New Labour and ignoring racism of the past
As regular readers will know, I partly didn’t vote Labour at the General Election last year because of their pathetic and muddled policies towards asylum seekers and the occasional immigration dog-whistling via Phil Woolas.
So I’m not an apologist for the party on the issue in any stretch of the imagination. But it does annoy me however when people say Labour must speak out to defend immigration otherwise things will get worse for everyone.
I have three points to make on this.
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Clubs can’t stop offensive football chants
I had never before today bothered to ponder the religious affiliations of PSV Eindhoven supporters. But I gather that, if anything, the Dutch football club has a solidly protestant tradition.
So why fans of Ranger thought it apt to launch into sectarian songs at both legs of the recent Europa Cup tie between the two sides, I am not quite sure.
The British press and rise of the far-right
contribution by James Bloodworth
The British press have been dirtying themselves for quite some time in the mucky sewer of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dave Osler believes the influence of the Daily Mail, the Sun and their ilk is exaggerated in this respect by the left, and not as influential as many like to believe.
He says the media caters to and feeds off an ample amount of already-existing prejudice. For reasons other than the fact that I find such thoughts incredibly depressing, I disagree.
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The case for Englishness and against Phil Woolas, by D-Miliband
David Miliband has written for the Guardian today on a report by Searchlight on far-right extremism of the English Defence League kind.
There are two themes that I can make out. One, a call for Englishness and for Labour to go down the path of discussing identity politics. The other a repudiation of David Cameron’s recent speech – and by extension former Labour MP Phil Woolas.
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Thilo Sarrazin: what limit to ‘no platform’?
Few current figures in public life are so widely execrated that Jewish groups and opponents of Islamophobia alike would seek to deny him the chance to address a public meeting at a London campus. But former Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin manages to make the cut.
The German Society at the London School of Economics invited Sarrazin to participate in a panel discussion, due to take place on Monday night. The title was ‘Europe’s Future: the Decline of the West’.
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Banning EDL marches, or being careful what you wish for
If you were a genuine democrat at the turn of 1937, you would have been scared. Fascism was on the march across Europe. Italy had fallen first; German Nazism had shut down the world’s greatest labour movement; a fascist-backed military coup against Spain’s left-leaning government had plunged the country into a nightmare civil war.
Here in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – backed by the likes of the Daily Mail – were loudly agitating for a fascist government on the European model. So perhaps you would have backed the Conservative Government’s Public Order Act, signed in to law on 1 January 1937.
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State multiculturalism: replace it with what?
I’m not quite sure whether David Cameron put his own name forward as a founding signatory of Unite Against Fascism, or Unite Against Fascism actively set out to secure his autograph. Either way, many will now be asking which of the two is being more opportunist in maintaining what has always looked suspiciously like a business relationship.
Two days ago, UAF played a leading role in organising a counter-demonstration against an English Defence League march through Luton. More or less simultaneously, the prime minister delivered a speech slamming something called ‘state multiculturalism’. The UAF lot surely won’t have liked that.
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Three problems with David Cameron’s speech on multiculturalism
I think the biggest problem with Cameron’s speech yesterday that it missed a vital opportunity to start a more mature and intelligent dialogue on integration and counter-terrorism, rather than continuing the hectoring tone reminiscent of Tony Blair’s government.
My objections can be divided into three areas.
First, it was striking how much it was simply about pandering to the Daily Mail crowd through strawmen, than saying anything new.
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Where’s the evidence Aaron Porter was racially abused?
Protests took place yesterday against the Tory led coalitions higher education cuts and fee hikes.
Throughout the campaign against the cuts, Aaron Porter has been a poor representative of the student body politic. Somewhat dithering, sometimes anonymous and something of an establishment lackey he is not a popular man.
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Oxbridge isn’t racist – but it’s failing the working class
Newspapers are frustrating. They often report stories that are genuinely interesting and worth investigating in a way that’s so misleading and confusing that the real point gets totally lost amid extremist rhetoric.
The Guardian’s reporting of David Lammy’s data on ethnic minority admissions of domestic Oxbridge undergraduates is a good example: some of the underlying data is good, but many of the factoids are wrong or misleading.
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Race and racism: A white Briton writes
When I fill in those diversity forms for job applications, I always put ‘White British’ or ‘White English’, or whatever variant I’m meant to use.
That’s what I am, although it seems so clumsy: what is ‘white British’ anyway and who gets to be that rather than, say, mixed race British? How mixed does your race have to be before you’re mixed race?
Does my gypsy grandmother count as ‘white’, or should that lineage be viewed as ‘mixed race’? I don’t know.
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#IagreewithHarriet – sign our open letter backing expulsion of Woolas
On Friday, after Phil Woolas was found guilty of lying in his election leaflets, Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman took the obvious and common sense decision to announce that he would be suspended from the Labour Party and that Labour wouldn’t be wasting its limited resources on helping him launch an appeal.
Today, we hear reports that some Labour MPs have told her that she is a “disgrace”, that “she should consider her position”, and that there was “real anger” at the event, with a lot of “shouting” from enraged MPs, as a result of this decision.
As a grassroots Labour supporter, I am sickened by this kind of self-indulgent behaviour.
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Vaz blames ‘racist shooting’ on video game
In a story you may not have picked up on over the weekend, Police in the Swedish city of Malmo have confirmed that an as yet unnamed 38 year old man has been arrested in connection with a series of gun attacks on people with ethnic minority backgrounds.
Prior to the arrest, local police had suspected that more than a dozen unsolved shootings over the last year, in which one person died and eight more were wounded, may have been the work of lone gunman. The man arrested at the weekend has now been charged with one count of murder and seven attempted murders.
Make of that story what you will, but what has piqued my interest here is not the story itself but an Early Day Motion (EDM 907) put down a couple of weeks ago by Labour MP, Keith Vaz, in relation to these shootings.
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Labour blames immigration but working class betrayal is the real issue
When talking about Phil Woolas, immigration or “white working class racism”, it’s easy to lose sight of some important points.
Especially when populist demagogues blame immigration for all our ills, with more success than anyone in their right mind would like.
1) For sheer economic reasons, which can only be avoided by sacrificing the massive economic gains associated with them, the unskilled working class have been screwed over since the 1970s.
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This isn’t a working class racism problem, it’s a Labour problem
contribution by Jon Lansman
Phil Woolas is out of the House of Commons (subject to a future judicial review) and suspended from the Labour Party.
The court was concerned not with racism, but with misrepresentation such as that illustrated here, and it is not a simple matter since the policing of it also raises issues of freedom of speech in elections.
Dan Hodges at Labour Uncut said:
for his accusers in the liberal mob – their verdict was passed long ago. ‘He is guilty. Those leaflets pandered to prejudice. They have no place in the new politics’. Save your breath. Woolas was never anything more than a patsy. The fall guy. Ritual sacrifice to our conscience.
Let us make clear: we have no desire to make Woolas a scapegoat. But he was appointed as Labour’s immigration minister after his election campaign strategy in Oldham came under scrutiny (which the Tories have attacked).
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Roshonara Choudhry and Muslim alienation
You must have seen that drawing of Roshonara Choudhry by now, if only because every media outlet seems to be using it. If it comes even close to a reasonable likeness, she looks every bit the homely geek girl that her academic track record suggests her to be.
The poor Bangladeshi kid from East Ham had done two years at Kings College London, one of Britain’s best universities, and they say that she was on for a first.
Her ambition was to become a teacher, a career that was surely within her grasp. Until she dropped out, that is.
Tomorrow she will be sentenced for the attempted murder of Stephen Timms, in an effort to exact, in her own words, revenge for the people of Iraq.
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Why I helped organised ‘Jews against EDL’ this Sunday
On Sunday the English Defence League mobilised outside the Israeli embassy for a rally in support of Israel with the guest speaker being Rabbi Nachum Shifren of The Tea Party, USA.
When I found out about the rally, which I was told was organised by the small but particularly vocal Jewish division of the EDL, I was fuming.
I felt there had to be a counter demonstration. So a few friends and I started organised one.
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Why Angela Merkel is wrong about ‘multiculturalism’
In Germany, Angela Merkel has stated that multiculturalism has “failed, utterly failed”. That the idea of people from different backgrounds living happily side by side does not work.
Further, that it is for immigrants to integrate and, by implication, not for the state that they live in to either accommodate or provide succour and encouragement.
This comes against the backdrop of rising racial tensions in Germany, a country with 3 million Muslims and senior officials publishing books accusing Muslims of lowering German intelligence.
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Why Phil Woolas is unfit to be in the Labour front-bench
Out of all the shadow cabinet appointments, it’s having Phil Woolas back at the Home Office that is the most disappointing. No actually, it makes me angry given recent revelations.
And it’s worth pointing out once more, properly, why Phil Woolas is unsuitable to be in the Labour party, let alone a shadow minister.
During the recent Labour party conference I went to a debate on immigration that featured Woolas as one of the speakers. He sounded perfectly sensible at the time.
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Why do media orgs report ethnicity of terrorist suspects?
A few days ago, five men were arrested in ‘a plot’ to threaten the Pope.
This is how Sky News first reported it:
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed.
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