‘Local homes for local people’ is meaningless
contribution by Tim Finch from ippr
After shooting himself in the foot with “British jobs for British workers” you would have thought the Prime Minister had learnt his lesson. But no, just last week we had a story headlined in The Sun as “Local Homes for Local People”.
It was trailing an announcement by Gordon Brown that the government was going to change the rules on how social housing is allocated. It was made clear that councils were to be given more scope to prioritise the housing needs of local people – in other words, the white working class who deserted Labour in droves in the recent elections.
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Anonymous job applications – ending discrimination
I have blogged several times about my idea to make use of anonymous job applications – so as to end the subliminal discrimination that creeps in with some applications being discarded because of the names on them.
I floated my idea during the Second Reading of the Equality Bill and it caused quite a hoo ha. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development waded in to support the idea – albeit they didn’t think it should be mandatory. Some Human Resource departments were less happy and thought it a stupid idea. Well – it will be interesting to see what they say in response to the evidence that’s now been gathered.
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Does more diversity really lead to unhappiness?
Excitingly for data-mining weirdos, the Department for Communities & Local Government has released data on various happiness-related statistics broken down by local authority. What else is broken down by local authority, that I’ve written about recently? – yup, ethnicity statistics.
One of the questions asked in the poll is “% who agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together”. If the theory that BNP voters are driven by fear of gangs of steaming Somalis, murderous mullahs and crack-dealing Caribbeans were correct, then you might expect there to be some kind of negative correlation between Nick Griffin’s multi-ethnic nightmares and the belief that ’round here things are pretty much OK’.
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Banning the BNP from classrooms?
I doubt this’ll work for everyone, but before deciding whether or not to support some new legislation, I like to set a few simple tests. First, the proponents would need to convince me that the problem they wish to address is important enough to require legislation, that only legislation could solve this problem and that the proposed legislation will actually work.
Next, you’d have to be pretty circumspect in ensuring that the ’solving’ of this problem wouldn’t then create a chain of unintentional negative consequences in the months & years to come, and that it doesn’t further restrict the liberty of people whose behaviours aren’t bothering or harming anyone.
By those standards, I’m not yet convinced by the recent call from the NASUWT to ban members of the BNP from the teaching profession.
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It’s not the immigrants’ fault that BNP voters are badly educated
Which schools in the UK do worst? No, it’s not the ones in areas crammed with ethnic minority kids. Or at least, not only do all ethnic groups other than black kids perform more-or-less identically in GCSEs [*] – out of the four worst-performing councils in London educationally, two of them have above-average levels of white-British kids, and one is hovering on the margins.
The left needs to confront the root causes of BNP support
This article is by author Paul Kingsnorth
The response of the British ‘left’ to the depressing sight of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons grinning like spoilt children on the election podium on Sunday night seems to be dividing into two broad approaches. The first is attack, the second denial.
The first approach was illustrated nicely by the egg-throwing, car-kicking, insult-chucking attack on Griffin yesterday by Unite Against Fascism. The left can’t agree on much, but it can always agree that it doesn’t like fascists, so it feels good and righteous and very simple to shout and throw things at them. But, entertaining though it is to see Nick Griffin pelted with yolks, he is no longer a fringe baddie; he is an MEP, and he represents people. It may be hard to stomach, but it is a fact that nearly a million Britons voted for his party last week.
Pelting elected representatives with eggs and shouting down their press conference has the effect of making the BNP look reasonable and the egg-throwers look, well, a bit fascistic in their keenness to silence by force the views of those they don’t agree with. Any approach which makes Nick Griffin look reasonable has to be judged a pretty dismal failure.
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Trying to blame the left for racism
There are two strategic reasons why the BNP was elected. First, the Labour party vote split and collapsed. Secondly, the left was split by infighting and small, inconsequential parties that had not much separating them. These things can be debated, and it’s right to ask why the Labour party has failed the working classes.
What does annoy me though are attempts by rightwing commentators, who really should know better, to pin the blame on ethnic minorities themselves and “the left”. It’s a nice rhetorical trick that makes them feel better – it’s not like the Conservative Party ever appropriated the language of the racists and had any of their members use the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour“. I mean that is just the work of fantasy isn’t it?
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Cheers Tim, but we already know what Fascists are
I see, from Sunny’s post in the small hours of this morning, that Tim Mongomerie has swiftly tried to capitalise on the election of Nick Griffin and opportunistically use it as a vehicle to promote the fiction that the BNP are, if not a Far-Left political organisation, then one that should not be identified as belonging to the Far-Right.
Sadly, it already appears his misconceived whining has born misshapen fruit, with Kate Sanderson casually tacking the sentiment “or as some say ‘far-left’” as an aside on a reference to the BNP as being ‘far-right’ during this mornings BBC Breakfast.
The problem being that, as a politically illiterate Neocon with no history or background in anti-Fascist activism, Montgomerie hasn’t got the foggiest idea what a duck is.
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Exposing The ‘Pro-Christian’ BNP…
With Edmund at Harry’s Place reporting that the BNP are still trying to pitch themselves as a ‘pro-Christian’ party, I decided that it’s about time I gave a fresh airing to a hard-hitting bit of artwork I put together quite a while ago, one that nicely illustrates the particular brand of ‘Christianity’ that some [former] BNP members like to peddle… continue reading… »
How churnalists become friends to the BNP
The BNP is a repugnant, racist organisation that is somehow able to present itself as a legitimate political party despite having a leader with a conviction for distributing Holocast-denying literature, a London Assembly member who spouts made-up crime stories and a track-record of misogyny that could keep Jim Davidson in material for the rest of his life.
The BNP is detestable, and it knows as much – which is why the party has been making exerted attempts to rebrand itself, dressing up racism as a culture war and claiming to stand up for the white man on the street against political correctness, immigration, and all those other half-lit monsters that loom from the national press.
There’s a commonly-made argument that the BNP thrive on being ostracised, that presenting them as bigots is playing into their hands. This is rubbish, of course.
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We should boycott the Queen’s party
There’s a load of good initiatives starting life on the LibCon website at the moment, not least Paul Evans’ call for a link between reselection/deselections and the strengthening of local parties, and the Labour activists letter to the NEC. It’s clear the website is becoming quite a political force.
Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, therefore, I’m using LibCon to start a call for a boycott of the Queen’s garden party, if the BNP are invited.
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Blaming for the BNP ‘protest’ vote
Firstly, you absolutely must go here and read this from last year. It’s a wonderful piece that removes all the fluff and nonsense that surrounds the issues of why people vote for fascist scum, leaving you with one inescapable conclusion: that scum are scum and vote for scum because they’re scum.
But no. People – ironically, it’s often the exact kind of people who would be deliberately simplistic about issues like crime, claiming that kids who nick a penny chew from the pick’n'mix are ‘feral’ and so on – like to get all complicated about the reasons why people vote BNP.
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BNP: leaflets and adverts
There is a minor controversy over some Royal Mail workers in Bristol refusing to deliver BNP leaflets, a position that is entirely allowed under their contracts.
Royal Mail has now backed down, after one local worker described the management acting as “cheerleaders for the BNP,” and asking individual workers “Why are you anti-BNP?” when they balked at delivering leaflets. What, a picture of Nick Griffin alongside a KKK leader and founder of Stormfront not enough?
But there’s a more worrying issue here. As Adam Bienkov highlights on Tory Troll, local newspaper owner Newsquest is happily taking money from these racists. I’m ok with local newspapers writing about the BNP if its a legitimate news story. But taking money from neo-nazis? Do they have no shame?
Then josephlaking messages me on twitter to say: “in Thurrock, where the BNP launched their manifesto, a local paper was carrying a story entitled ‘BNP choose us for launch” — just great. Do readers know of other instances of local newspaper carrying BNP advertising?
Update: I’ve compiled a list here.
Miliband hosts far-right Israeli nationalist
Foreign secretary David Miliband will today meet the foreign minister from Israel Avigdor Lieberman. The Guardian describes him as “hardline”, but others have dubbed him as “fascist”.
So why is the foreign secretary giving time and space to someone who should be shunned by a liberal democracy?
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A different approach to the BNP?
This week the anti-BNP coalition Hope Not Hate released a video depicting Nick Griffin as Hitler leading the next Reich. A viral tool to help prevent the BNP obtaining a seat in the fast approaching European elections, the video made my mates laugh – but it made me feel uncomfortable.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of Hope not Hate. In fact, I’m currently sitting in front of several large boxes of their leaflets to deliver around Tower Hamlets and Islington. But I’m worried about the one-sided, overly negative approach we’re taking.
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Patriotism, the BNP and being a publican
To “serve and protect” is a phrase famously associated with police officers in certain high-profile cities in America but it’s also a phrase I associate with the job of landlord. It’s a pun first made to me by the landlord at my local down in Southampton mumble years ago. The pub was a tiny Victorian establishment with a 2-barrel brewery that was visible through a glass panel behind the bar, so you could drink your Sweet Sensation [1] and watch the next batch brewing. I was told “Our job is to serve drinks and protect peace of mind. The brewer sells beer: the landlord sells happiness.”
I am tired of being told I’m a leftie, which I’m really not; but I’m equally tired of the assumption that if I were, I must ‘hate Britain’. That’s very Yankee thinking; that any progressive view or compassionate view or inclusive view is anti-patriotic.
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Committing hara-kiri over Gurkhas
Without a doubt I’m delighted Gordon Brown and Phil Woolas were humiliated in losing the Gurkha vote. And all credit to Nick Clegg for precipitating the climbdown. But I’ve been mystified why this government refused to give in to what was so obviously the right moral and political stance to take. Did Phil Woolas really believe that by taking a hardline against the Gurkhas somehow this government would be seen as tough against all immigrants (which it is already)? Or perhaps there were other equally idiotic political calculations I was unaware of.
Anyway, so yesterday I repeated on Twitter something Lynne Featherstone MP had said: “Labour defeated in Parliament vote on Gurkhas!” — and I immediately got replies from Dave Cole, Sadie Smith and clawsfour saying: “Screw you. I’m Lab supporting the Gurkhas. But fed up with Tory lies – how many Gs did they home? 0!”
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Labour heartlands: fertile ground for the far right?
The increase in support for the far right in cities like Stoke-on-Trent over the past decade well illustrates the need for Labour to strengthen its appeal to the white working classes as well as to middle England. Any increase in support for the BNP raises all sorts of questions about how progressive politics deals with the rise of the far right in Britain. The Labour Party has long argued that, as a nation, we should do whatever we can to tackle xenophobia and racial hatred from wherever it surfaces. This, of course, is right but the key question is how is this best achieved?
Anti-semitism, the left and human rights
I have been meaning to respond to a couple of an article that David Toube wrote about the left and anti-Semitism in the Guardian for the last couple of months, but pressure of work prevented me. Since then he has written another piece on a similar theme at Harry’s Place and we have been treated to the bizarre spectacle of a holocaust-denier addressing a UN conference of racism – albeit with a lot of heckling and walkouts.
In his original article David made the point: ‘Although opposition to racism is now an article of faith for all mainstream political parties, the left has been the driving force in those organisations that set the antiracist agenda. There is a part of the left that is very comfortable condemning historical racism against Jews, at the hands of Nazis, back in the 1940s. It is, however, ambivalent when it comes to contemporary antisemitism: particularly when it can be “contextualised” within the Israel/Palestine conflict.’ I do not have much to say to that – other than that I agree with it and, while I would never associate with that ‘part of the left’, to which he is referring, I think that it does describe a worrying body of opinion.
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Woolas: the Minister for Invertebrates
Phil Woolas yesterday responded to the recent Daily Mail article in which the paper suggested that British-born descendants of relatively recent immigrants shouldn’t be classified as British, an article that Sunder delightfully skewered only a week or so ago.
Woolas’ full statement can be usefully summarised as ‘nothing to do with me, guv‘ followed by a stream of complaints which amount to the suggestion that the Office of National Statistics is actively politicking on the issue of migration, hence the claim that the statistical data is released on the 24 Feb, on which the Mail’s story appears to have been based, was accompanied by a nine page press release which ‘highlighted the 1 in 9 figure as the main finding’.
Woolas’ unusually strong assertions, set my ‘there’s-something-not-quite-right bump’ itching, for no better reason than the fact that I simply cannot recall a single instance in which the ONS have ever come within a country mile of behaving in the manner that Woolas claims – and when a politician starts claiming that an independent civil service agency is acting in manner that’s completely out of character then I, for one, start looking around for signs of small furry mammals of the genus ‘Rattus‘.
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