Let’s not make Nazi martyrs
I’m heading to Westminster Magistrates Court this afternoon, to cover the extradition hearing of Dr Frederick Toben. The outcome is by no means certain, and has potential to affect British free expression, rendering citizens here vulnerable to prosecution in EU countries with less liberal legislation.
This will be Toben’s fourth appearance at court, and the court will be, as it has been previously, packed with a mixture of frantically scribbling hacks and a smattering of Toben’s supporters, among whom Michelle Renouf and David Irving are the most notable.
Toben has been subjected to a European Arrest Warrant issued by German authorities. One’s initial reaction to the EAW is to baulk at just how wide ranging they can be. But as Chris Huhne points out on Index on Censorship this morning, they are a valuable tool:
“The arrest warrant is extradition for the Ryanair age. If criminals can re-emerge hundreds of miles away in a different jurisdiction within hours of a crime, the state must be able to pursue offenders without the interminable bureaucracy that is such a feature of traditional extradition. But countries must be able to trust each other’s legal systems and the responsible use of the warrant, or the political support for the warrant will wither.”
As with so many legal tools, sensible, sensitive application seems the key. The EAW is not, in and of itself, a bad mechanism. But in this case, the UK authorities have been far too keen to comply with their German counterparts, and ended up stepping in to a legal minefield. We can only hope that this afternoon, we return to a sensible position.
Why Labour Voters Ought to Think Again
Yeah, I figured that headline would get the attention of some of you. Cory Doctorow has posted what it’s like to be on the sharp end of Labour’s current policies. Because I know that some of you won’t be arsed to click the link, I’m going to copy and paste.
Earlier this year, I married my British fiancée and switched my visa status from “Highly Skilled Migrant” to “Spouse.” This wasn’t optional: Jacqui Smith, the British Home Secretary, had unilaterally (and on 24 hours’ notice) changed the rules for Highly Skilled Migrants to require a university degree, sending hundreds of long-term, productive residents of the UK away (my immigration lawyers had a client who employed over 100 Britons, had fathered two British children, and was nonetheless forced to leave the country, leaving the 100 jobless). Smith took this decision over howls of protests from the House of Lords and Parliament, who repeatedly sued her to change the rule back, winning victory after victory, but Smith kept on appealing (at tax-payer expense) until the High Court finally ordered her to relent (too late for me, alas). continue reading… »
Can we give the white working classes what they want?
This was the title of a fringe event hosted by the Fabian Society on Saturday morning at party conference. It was packed out completely, especially for an early afternoon Saturday when the conference had barely started.
I didn’t want to preach to the converted, but I was amazed at the extent to which those in the audience steered away from the issue I raised about identity and culture, and back to economics and equal pay. I left a bit shocked. There is serious work to be done on the left folks.
Here is what I said – I was only given two minutes before the panel debate started.
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Are schools ‘institutionally racist’?
New research by Warwick University’s Professor Steve Strand has found that British children of Caribbean heritage are discriminated against when entered for SATS tests at Key Stage 3 (Year 9 and aged 14).
Government data shows that children from a number of ethnic minority groups, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black African Britons, were doing far worse in these tests than white Britons. But while social factors such as economic background, attitudes to and attendance at school and mothers’ educational attainment appeared to explain this in relation to the other groups, it did not seem to with regard to the Caribbeans.
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Re-thinking Obama (pt1): Why Democrats matter
Here goes the latest attack line against Barack Obama on various right-wing blogs.
George Bush’s ratings are the lowest ever for any president in history and the people are sick of this Republican administration. McCain is old and frequently makes mistakes even when talking about foreign policy. The economy is in doldrums. Meanwhile, Democrat voter registration is way higher than Republican and they much more energised about getting rid of the Republicans this year. Barack Obama can attract huge crowds in the USA and abroad. McCain has silly little townhall meetings.
So why is Obama only about 4% ahead in the national polls? There must be something wrong with him…
It has been repeated all over the American blogs and more recently made its way to Republican cheerleaders here. There are some obvious rebuttals.
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Whitewashing Beyonce
The image on the left shows the singer Beyonce Knowles as she normally appears in public. The image on the right is from a L’Oréal ad campaign. Spot the difference.
Now, the company insists they didn’t digitally alter Ms Knowles complexion in order to make her look more white, and while this stretches the limits of credibility I suppose it’s possible that they achieved it through the use of make-up and clever lighting. Either way, the image on the right is vastly different to what Ms Knowles actually looks like; she appears far more light-skinned and the only way they could’ve done this is through some sort of manipulation.
Since the ‘natural’ Beyonce is no slouch in the looks department, it’s natural to suspect sinister intent.
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Struggle not submission – SBS win over Ealing
It was back in April this year that Ealing Council voted to withdraw funding from Southall Black Sisters, a women’s support group, on the spurious grounds that targeting services at black and minority ethnic groups ran contrary to the “equality” and “integration” agenda.
In a complete misinterpretation of the Race Relations Act, Ealing Council’s Conservative-run council furthermore proposed that in the interests of “community cohesion”, domestic violence services in the borough should henceforth be generic.
Specific services to vulnerable women were then in serious danger of being lost, and one of the women’s sector’s most powerful and influential campaigning organisations was under threat of closure. That all ended on Friday, when Ealing Council conceded defeat in the High Court.
Why racist narratives matter
The image on the right is a good example of modern xenophobia. Its not racist in the traditional sense, with a picture of some black guy running off with a white woman for example.
It’s part of a narrative that says: the Muslims are not only here, but they’ll take over by multiplying and destroying us. The bomb is the womb… etc. I don’t even have to deconstruct it too much – its obvious what the message is.
Stuff like this has a long tradition. Decades ago the narrative was that the world was controlled by a “Jewish copnspiracy”, and you can still this prevalent on far-right websites where they talk of the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government).
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Reactions to Doctor Who Broke My Brain
I have spent about five hours so far collating reactions to last night’s Who and am still not done yet, so if this is a bit disjointed, blame Russell T Davies. When I’ve finally done I’ll be making Liberal use of this and picturing Rusty in the role of Boss.
Tips to the usual address: all submissions will be considered, although there’s no guarantee of inclusion.
Andrew Hickey has a great post about why the Lib Dems’ current strategy is completely arse-about-face, which neatly encapsulates my own feelings on the matter and chimes with Mike Smithson’s recent post too.
Stuff White People Like dissects Godwin’s Law: “all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.”
Shakesville reports on a fiscal fly in John McCain’s soup.
On my blog there are tips for those who wish to pile the pressure on Heinz like Lynne F. continue reading… »
Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day
It’s a dark day for me as a Liberal, but I find myself in agreement with the Daily Fail. I despise the Mail, and pretty much everything they stand for, but Harperson’s Equality Act definitely has a sting in the tail.
In my view, Positive Discrimination is still discrimination and it is wrong. Even in this limited way, endorsing discrimination perpetuates it, rather than eradicating it. It adds vast amounts of resentment for little perceivable benefit.
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Power and the politics of race
This week’s events have corroborated my belief that we can learn more about society and politics from Big Brother than from Today in Parliament.
Alexandra’s expulsion from the house for “intimidating” behaviour demonstrates our ruling class’s terror of anything remotely resembling a physical threat; violence is something done to foreigners, not “respectable“ white people.
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Reframing the debate on asylum and refugees
In case you didn’t know, Refugee Week starts today. While The Guardian has been doing an excellent job of countering the anti-immigrant bias in the media, this excerpt from Mark Haddon’s piece on visiting the Migrant Resources Centre in Victoria, London particularly drives home for me how far we have slipped in this country:
How did we end up treating human beings in this way?
Mario, the MRC’s legal adviser, came to the UK in 1978, with his wife and sister-in-law, after escaping from Colombia, where the government had 68,000 of its opponents behind bars. They were terrified and knew nothing about asylum law. All the immigration officials who dealt with their claim, however, were helpful, courteous and surprisingly knowledgeable about Colombian politics. The three of them were granted temporary admission. The following year they were given full refugee status. ‘I can only be grateful to the UK for the protection offered to me and my family during those difficult days… After nearly 30 years here, I have two children and one granddaughter. We feel British. When I come back to the UK after visiting my elderly parents I always feel as if I am coming home.’
Mario’s is not an isolated case. I’ve spoken to a number of refugees who arrived in the UK 10, 15, 20 years ago. Most were impressed and surprised by the warmth of the welcome they received, and none of them went through the demeaning experiences that many of today’s asylum seekers go through.
What happened during those intervening years? Of course, there has always been racism and intolerance, but only in recent times have these sentiments been allowed to drive and shape official government policy.
Let’s see if the right-wing press will take a one-week amnesty, at least, from their racist/xenophobic anti-immigrant reporting. (Recent headlines: “Has mass immigration wrecked Britain?”, “Do you think immigration is to blame for rise in violent crime?”, and a classic – “Immigration out of control”. Meanwhile last week the Daily Mail served up this dehumanising headling: “Father of four finds 12-strong colony of illegal immigrants living in his LOFT”.)
Incidentally, any UK readers seeking inspiration on this issue from across the Atlantic could do worse than checking out the fairly recently-launched blog The Sanctuary.
Where are these Muslim no-go areas?
The story that two Christian evangelicals were stopped from preaching in Birmingham has had tons of bloggers literally creaming their pants. So much so that my article yesterday on CIF attracted about ten comments just posting it so they could derail the thread, or erm, say I must be pleased by it. What?
Melanie Phillips predictably called the story Britain’s slide into dhimmocracy. I’m assuming she didn’t use ‘dhimmitude’ because there were already 47372 posts titled that.
I know this is hard for the bloggers creaming their pants, but let’s work through the logic here.
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Daily Mail and the knuckle draggers
Richard Barnbrook’s surprising description of some BNP members as “knuckle dragging junk” is very similar to Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn’s description of them as “knuckle scraping scum.” However, a recent post on his Telegraph hosted blog shows that the Mail-Heil imitation doesn’t stop there.
Because when Richard Barnbrook wrote that we should ‘blame the immigrants’ there was some suggestion that he had broken the law on inciting racial hatred.
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In a free state, tongues too should be free
The Declaration of Human Rights (article 19) states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Which looks like a reasonable starting point to me.
Except we’ve never held to this idea in its purest form. It’s generally accepted that it should be an offence to slander someone, to incite illegal acts, to distribute child pornography – most of us don’t believe people should be able to say anything they please regardless of the consequences.
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Voting out the far-right
Mike Ion thinks the Labour leadership should do more to combat the rise of the BNP:
Gordon Brown would send out a powerful message to his party’s core supporters if he were to personally throw his weight behind a call for a new “coalition of the willing” that will help to blunt the advance of the far-right in this country by addressing some of the genuine concerns of white working-class voters while at the same time openly challenging those concerns that have no factual or legitimate basis.
I fear Mike’s plea will go unheeded. The fact is that our electoral system gives Labour little incentive to fight the far-right, or listen to its core supporters.
Labour will not lose the next election because of the rise of the BNP in places like Stoke (Mike’s example).
It makes no difference if Labour’s 10,000 majorities in Stoke’s constituencies are cut by thousands because of the BNP or abstainers.
What will cost Labour the election is the loss of places like Worcester or Oxford West. And although abstentions or BNP votes by white working class voters in those areas could be a problem, they are less a danger than middle-income floating voters swinging to the Tories. It was his grasp of this fact that helped Blair win three elections.
So, could it be that ignoring its core support – and the rise in the BNP this threatens – is one of the prices we must pay for our first-past-the-post system?
Telegraph gives the fascists a platform
via Jim Jay, it looks like the Telegraph website is hosting a blog by BNP London councillor Richard Barnbrook.
So far Barnbrook has written three posts, including Lily Allen and the BNP, and Blame the Immigrants. Fits right in with Telegraph editorial policy then.
Jim Jay points out:
Among other exciting proposals ubergrupen fuhrer Barnbrook has for us in his “Blame the immigrants piece” include;
- The police should disobey the government and pursue their own sort-of-legal agenda. He adds “A free society is one where the police can do their job the way they want to do it.” Although most of us would call that a police state rather than “free societies”, but the haircut knows best.
- You know there never was any violent crime until we started letting in darkies and their communist friends. “Most of it [knife and gun crime] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”
- But what is to be done with our streets over run with all these “ethnics”? In order to clean up the streets send in the army. Yes. The army. I’m not joking, that’s what our man in the Eagle’s Nest is proposing. To get rid of guns on the streets we’ll fill the streets with… oh hold on.
- If the commies oppose this sensible measure? Well the “human rights lawyers can scream all they want.” Presumably in a basement somewhere, whilst Brownshirts tear out their fingernails.
Richard Barnbrook: The Great White Dope
When the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook stooped forward to give his victory speech this weekend, both the main candidates and the news channels left the stage. Which was a shame. Because a better demonstration of the real man’s character and party could not have been found.
Now I have always thought that the ‘no-platform’ approach is wrong. To deny the far-right a voice is to give them a status that they do not deserve.
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Why I’m in favour of British jobs for British workers
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ diatribe, and any resulting debate on immigration cannot pass without hyperbole and hand-wringing that gets us nowhere.
No surprise that the right-wing dinosaur Simon Heffer was found squealing that accusations of racism levelled at that great chap were “a deliberate lie”, despite the fact he was specifically warning that allowing non-white people into this country would destroy it. There’s a more reasoned piece here on centre-right but to no surprise the commenters have shouted him down as a closet-communist.
Right-wingers aside, we’re also plagued by a whole section of nutbags who call themselves libertarians except when it comes to the free movement of people between countries. Irrelevant they may be in the wider population, they are annoyingly over-represented on blogs though.
Problematically, there is already too much conflation in this issue between immigrants and 2nd/3rd generation Britons. This isn’t made helpful when the media start scaremongering either. This weekend Trevor Phillips made a speech that was blown up into a “cold war” by the Sunday Times when the actual text of his speech is far more measured.
I think the problem with immigration is partly that the liberal-left doesn’t have a narrative on the issue. As Phillips rightly says, Enoch Powell made immigration controls into such a tabboo that no one excplicitly wanted to talk about it even if they tried their best to implement them.
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Migrants stole my baby (again)
You can tell just how much the Grauniad’s report yesterday on how migrants have not brought a crime wave with them and how, unsurprisingly, they’re not committing more offences than anyone else overall has wound up the Daily Mail and Express by the vehemence of their response today.
Along with the recent immigration report by the Lords committee that, despite tabloid coverage, concluded migrants had on the whole not significantly benefited or been detrimental to the country, the crime angle is the one sure fire hit which they can rely upon to really fire minds against the current immigration policy, with their impact on public services and negligible use of benefits following closely behind. For it to blown apart just as they appeared to be getting the upper hand could not possibly be tolerated.
Hence why both have come out all guns blazing.
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