Dear Other White People

Dear Other White People

If the covid crisis is unprecedented, the last few weeks has seen Britain reach even deeper depths of the surreal as again and again race issues we liked to imagine existed only in the USA come more and more frequently to the fore here too. Whether it is someone abusing people from black or other minority ethnic background on a train or bus, or police stopping a car with black occupants (one of whom turned out in a recent incident not to be a burglar but a Member of Parliament), or the rise of openly racist groups like the Patriotic Alternative (even the BNP at least pretended not to be racist), our society stands as exposed as any other as saturated in bigotry and prejudice. As much as anywhere else, our society can hear the rants and witness the acts committed against those whose skin colour or clothes or other characteristics suggest they are not directly descended from the white Caucasians our history traditionally claims “native” British people are descended from.

Following the casting of the statue of 18^th century slaveowner Edward Colston into the waters off Bristol harbour, at the entrance to the ocean over which he transported 100,000 black Africans to work as slaves in the British colonies, a wide range of white voices, sadly including even the new Labour Party leader, condemned the act by a crowd of people of different races. They had marched through the streets of a city whose wealth is founded on the slave trade, all united in proclaiming that Black Lives Matter particularly in the wake of the appalling murder in the USA of a black man George Floyd by a white policeman, who slowly strangled him in public over nine long, agonising minutes. A couple of weeks ago, extraordinarily, video footage showed a British cop trying the exact same thing on a black suspect.

Fascist taking the piss on a police memorial

In June and July, tens of thousands of all race backgrounds took part in BLM demonstrations in hundreds of cities and towns around the UK, but the wave of protest was largely negated. The mass media pondered on the possibility of a surge in covid (which never happened) as a result of the protests, in spite of them being generally well-arranged and socially distanced. Where there were crowds, they were far more often the rightwing Football Boys or remnants of the EDL or Britain First who trooped out in varying but smaller numbers tanked up with bile and beer to shout abuse at the BLM marchers in between literally pissing on the streets of London on behalf of the pot-bellied Master Race.

Yet somehow the narrative shifted. Spray paint on Churchill’s statue in London one weekend led to the monument being boarded up the following weekend and in a well-tried rightwing tactic several tabloids associated a call by a small anarchist group to remove it because of his well-known racist views (he was particularly hostile towards Indians and as well as denigrating their vital contribution to the war, stood by disinterestedly as three million Bengalis died of famine in 1943 as food was diverted to feed the British army) as being a demand of the wider BLM movement. Faux horror and shock erupted over an almost entirely false story and before long PM Boris Johnson first obliquely encouraged had right violence supposedly in defence of the statues and then proclaimed that he would not “take the knee”, the symbolic act of BLM.

So now the prevailing argument runs that we need to concentrate on the Now; the statues are either irrelevant or, apparently, key symbols of our history and to remove them would pose a great threat to our identity as Britons – presumably white ones. And as for now, well, we need to focus on stopping an "invasion" of would-be migrants, many fleeing wars started by or supplied by the UK, from crossing the Channel. The far right Britain First group is lauded by the gutter press for launching a patrol boat to deter the desparate people making dangerous attempts to enter a country where they perhaps mistakenly believe they will find safety. As the Home Secretary bravely talks about deploying the armed services against these wretched refugees, many families with small children, we seem to go into some sort of xenophobic fit.

But of course, it's not to do with race. It's just about protecting ourselves... After all, with four Asian or Black Ministers sitting at the Cabinet table in major offices of state, how could Britain be anything but a multicultural paradise, blind to prejudice? With a few black and brown faces on TV and even in parliament, we may argue Britain has changed.

Except it hasn’t. We still live in a racist state.
We sing Rule Britannia on live TV at the BBC Proms each year and create the mythical narrative of our ancestors bravely shouldering "the white man’s burden" of civilising the savages.

Yet we were, and we are, the savages.

For as we sing "Britons never, never shall be slaves", we conveniently forget - we were slavers. Our Empire, its wealth and the legacy we still benefit from, were in truth the black peoples’ burden as, along with Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danish slavers, Britain ripped nearly 13 million black people from their homelands, communities and families and transported 10 million to the Americas (3 million people - dead, dying or insubordinate - were put overboard en route and lie at the bottom of the Atlantic) to labour in a range of plantations, whipped, raped, abused and worked to their deaths. And back in Africa, our great heroes like Stanley machine-gunned thousands of Congolese and torched hundreds of villages in search of the saintly Dr Livingstone as he acquired swathes of Africa for the Empire.

Black African or Caribbean people are 4% of our population, but 40% of those in poverty. People of South Asian origin are castigated as terrorists or grooming gang members, while people who look like they may have antecedents in China are accused of causing covid sickness. All are more likely to be unemployed, unwell, physically attacked - or worse.

Just this last week, the Metropolitan Police closed the case of Stephen Lawrence, the young black man murdered by passing white racists while he waited for a bus back in 1993, on the grounds that they do not believe they will ever prosecute all those involved in his death - only two members of a much larger gang who stabbed him to death have been jailed and even that took 18 years to achieve. While the appalling handling of his case eventually led to a finding of the Met being institutionally racist and some attempts at reform being carried out, for Stephen and his family, justice remains as elusive as ever.

Stephen Lawrence - murdered by racists in 1993

And this is where we have to look at ourselves if we are white. We may consider ourselves to not be racist. We may have black or Asian friends, maybe we’ve been to a Hindu temple or Muslim mosque or a Sikh wedding, enjoyed a culture night here and there. Like a good curry...

In truth we seem to be actually quite an insecure lot. Perhaps our assumption of superiority, whether manifesting as smug benevolence or hostile aggression, stems from knowing our greatness exploded from the barrels of guns and that our Empire was no different to any other. Brutal, exploitative and racist.

And like anyone raised in an environment where brutality towards others is seen as a norm, we need to spend some time in questioning our own assumptions, beliefs, feelings. We may not think we are like our great-grandparents, but their blood courses in our veins and their ideas endure in our heads and outlooks, just as their loot lies deep in the founds of our country.

And we need to ask ourselves, who are we really?

Reams have been written about the ongoing racism that leaves black and Asian people in the UK facing discrimination, harassment, intimidation and even physical violence – deaths are mercifully fewer than in the USA, but that is probably more on account of our lacking a full-on “gun culture” than any greater racial harmony - and firearms deployed by the police feature often enough in the deaths of black people identified as potential or actual menaces purely because of their skin and the stereotypes around these of “looking suspicious”.

And this is far from confined to neofascists on the far right, like the rotund characters “defending” Churchill’s statue in London with alleged Nazi-style salutes and bottles chucked at police horses while chanting “We are racists and we like it.” Nor is it just the constable in Cambridge whose video from 2015 shot to viral infamy as he explained to a motorist that he was indeed stopping him because, “no offence mate, but you’re black.”

This prejudice soaks our culture – from a presenter on Sky News asking a black colleague why she stays in Britain (her home country) when she has so many criticisms to make of its racism to the every day assumptions that ultimately leave people of colour substantially more likely to be sick and dead from covid than their white counterparts.

Many years ago, Mohammed Ali memorably asked “Why is everything white?” in an amusing but telling interview on the BBC Parkinson show. Nearly half a century on, there seems to have been little progress or, if there was, it has now been substantially reversed by several decades of a political culture that has used “immigrants” and “refugees” (spit the words out!) as scapegoats for the much harsher, individualistic country we have become.

And for these words, read “black people” – for as the Brexit debate crystallised (but did not originate) the hate, the xenophobia that has become ever more blatantly evident has not primarily been concerned about incomers as a whole nearly as much as it has played to deeper white prejudice against black people, whether migrants or British born. “Go home to Africa!”, accompanied by puerile monkey-noises, has been an oft-heard taunt of the counter-demonstrators at more than one Black Lives Matter event in recent weeks.

Yet while many, even the majority, of white British people will insist they are not racist and may ourselves find the poisonous outpourings of Britain First and the Football Lads Alliance (never mind our Prime Minister’s encouragement of them) deeply offensive, there is another side to prejudice against black people we all too often shy away from; and that is white privilege.

The mere mention of White Privilege of course often meets with howls of protest from white people. Where is the privilege of a white homeless man compared to the wealth of someone like Chancellor Rishi Sunak? What about a single parent Mum on a predominantly white council estate rubbing by on social security compared to Priti Patel or Kwasi Karteng, both senior government ministers or a slew of prominent black people on the media, in sport or business? How can there possibly be such a thing as white privilege?

Well, let’s look at what White Privilege is and what it is not.

I recall just once, a single time ever, being treated in what could be viewed as a racist way when another white man attributed to me "Scottish narrow-mindedness" because I disagreed with him on something at work. Taken aback, I remember asking him what he meant and it became obvious this was his long held view not just of me, but of all Scottish people, whoever we were. In effect, he was shutting down my voice not because of anything I had done or could do – but because of where I was born, who he perceived me to be.

One, single time. It had no particular consequences for me. My other colleagues didn’t share his prejudice nor his view on the matter in hand and I suffered no detriment other than brief frustration at not being listened to.

But I have often wondered since - what if that happened to me every day, several times? What if it had been going on since I was born? What if it was accompanied by insults and anger even from random strangers? What if it was accompanied by threats and actual violence? What if people stared at me suspiciously on trains or equated me to an animal or a pet "as a joke"?

What if they sprayed that I wasn’t welcome on the door of my home? Or shoved shit or poured petrol through the letterbox? What if my achievements were either denigrated as having to be down to cheating or special treatment or even bizarrely praised as exceptional for "someone like you"?

And what if people who shared my nationality were many times more likely to be out of work or low paid or in substandard housing or sick or killed, maybe because everyone else thought like my former colleague that there was something inherent in us that meant we didn’t even deserve to be heard? And what if I complained or even just politely asked for better, I was asked who I thought I was or why was I "playing the race card"? How would I feel, day in, day out?

Yet that is precisely how it is for black and Asian people in the UK. Even those who may enjoy other types of privilege as males or being from a wealthy background. Still they have and continue to face denigration of one sort of another not because of what they think, say or do, but simply because of the colour of their skin, or their faith or accent.

A black woman posted a video on Facebook today of a white man screaming abuse at her and other black people on the London Underground simply for being black. The sheer hatred exuding from the man towards people he had never met before is terrifying, but perhaps the saddest part of all was in the words she posted on the video: "Being black in the UK is tiring."

So my white privilege is that I don’t face these things, at least not for being white. It is the advantage of not being treated with derision or suspicion, of not having to do something twice to prove you're not cheating, or not having negative assumptions laid upon and hostile treatment visited on you - simply because of your race or the colour of your skin.

 Yes, we can all have tough times. And no one is saying all white people have it easy - in our world, relatively few people do. There is much that needs to change for all of us, which is why I am a socialist. 

But if you are white, then yes we have the privilege in our racist society, with its "hostile environment" and a government - elected by us - headed up by a man whose lazy, drooling lips ooze racial insults and calls his Orcs onto the streets to spit their venom and piss their prejudice over the pavements of our capital city.

If we are white, we have the privilege of being born into, growing up and living in a country founded on the spoils of Empire, the loot from scores of other countries around the world and the impressed labour of countless millions of black, Asian, Chinese and other peoples. Yet even last month at the height of the BLM demonstrations, an opinion poll showed that the overwhelming majority of white British people are actively “proud” of our Imperial past and suddenly keen to preserve the statues of slavers and colonialists they hitherto probably barely even noticed as they passed by. Removing these things would allegedly “erase our history” even although oddly enough I have no recollection of learning history by looking at statues usually randomly erected to praise the wealth of dead men.

We are of course far from alone in not confronting our past. Few nations ever do - so perhaps we could lead the world for once in acknowledging the tragedies of our history.

Acknowledging our white privilege is not about blaming ourselves for the deeds of our ancestors, but it is about acknowledging, understanding and making some sort of reparation for the impact of the past on today. Just as no family exists independently of its preceding generations, nor does any nation. You may not realise it but if you were a UK taxpayer, then as late as 2015 you were still paying for the huge compensation payments made to slave owners by the British government when slavery was finally ended in the 1830s. But for white Britons, at the same time as paying the taxes, we gained all the benefits of the wealth of Empire and the economic advantages founded on that and which continue through to today either via the legacy of past Dominion or by the economic imperialism of today.

And if you want to truly know our white history, and your own, it is worth reflecting that if you know of a black person who shares your surname, you almost certainly do so because at some time some of your ancestors owned their ancestors – slave owners were not just a rich elite: a bit like property timeshares today, tens of thousands of ordinary British people “invested” in slaves they never met or saw, but whose labour or rental paid dividends to them. You can track back at the National Archives online. More than any statue of a slaver, a black person with your surname is a living testimony to our true history of violence, murder, indenture and rape.

In contrast, the "freed" black slaves received not a penny in compensation and indeed initially remained in a similar legal condition as "apprenticed freemen". Even when this was done away with, overwhelmingly they remained mired in poverty and scrapping by on the subsistence wages paid by their former owners – and those who later came here on the Windrush and subsequently, who worked in the jobs white people wouldn’t do and who have played a huge part in keeping the NHS going, they have also paid via their taxes towards the debts on the slave-owners’ compensation. In effect even in the 21^st century black Britons have been having to buy their own freedom.

And just as our white advantages have endured, so have so many of black people’s disadvantages. That is how capitalism functions - generation by generation generally it locks in the benefits and barriers, and all the more so if accompanied by racism and violence.

So only by understanding our history and economic system better do we make any sense of today and of ourselves and our attitudes. We cannot on the one hand want to commemorate the myths of our allegedly glorious past while denying the impact of the horrific things done by our ancestors. And while we urgently need to tackle our institutions and social norms, we also have to check ourselves – no amount of race awareness training, positive action programmes or diversity monitoring will make an ace of a difference if we don’t look at how we ourselves behave, consciously and unconsciously too. How colour blind are we truly? And indeed, should we be, for by setting race aside, are we truly seeking equality or is it as much a means of denying the reality for BAME people of the prejudices past and present in limiting life chances and even in some cases life itself?

Psychology shows that humans are a social creature. We thrive on one another and our inherent nature is compassionate and co-operative, not the competitive, conflict-driven creature we are repeatedly told we are. Yet just as we are at core collegiate, the inevitable limits of the number of people we can personally know and the division of our world into nations, races and classes – all, ultimately at some level fictions we choose to believe in – we can too easily be drawn into a sense of Us, our community, our family, our friends, and the Other: those who do not look like Us, who maybe wear different clothes, have different accents, traditions, skin tone. And if we don’t like anything, it seems uncertainty and the unknown hold much fear for many humans.

So here, too often, some sow the seeds of division, turning the joy of difference into a threat: a demand for equality somehow a call for domination. Nearly always it is driven by ignorance rather than hostility, but the one can easily morph into the other and it is certainly experienced by its victims as hostile. Racism has been fostered by decades of rumours and lies spread by small groups of organised xenophobes and fascists, egged on at a supposedly respectable distance by the mass media and many mainstream politicians. So in the 70s we saw Thatcher steal the National Front’s clothes to crack down on immigration, in the 2000s Gordon Brown sought to tackle the rise of the BNP by wittering about British jobs for British workers and of course the allegedly liberal Cameron fostered the hostile environment to ape UKIP as it grew at his party’s expense.

Ignorance will never be defeated by softly legitimising it with a dob of “reasonable racism”. It can only be tackled by calling it out when you see it. Silence doesn’t just mean consent – it positively manufactures it. It creates cultures where many who are profoundly uncomfortable with what is going on around them will nevertheless comply because the silence of others makes them feel they are alone and resistance is futile. Watch the closing scene of “Butterfly’s Tongue”, a film about the relationship between a little Spanish boy and his elderly schoolteacher during the civil war, and you will see how easily it happens.

Yet the striking thing when you do challenge racism is not how entrenched it is, but how paper-thin much of the anger can be. Ignorance stems often from its own pot of despair, fed and fuelled by genuine grievances but with a misplaced target. One of the most striking moments for me when I was canvassing and encountered three people sitting on a garden wall who said they were voting for the hard right BNP. I have known some on the Left whose response would be to angrily denounce them as racists and even refuse to speak with them – yet that would do nothing. Calling out racism isn’t necessarily about shouting at it.

Instead, talk with them. If they utter racial slurs or threats, ask them why they have chosen to do or say what they do. Ask them to think how they would feel if someone did that to their mother or father. If they think white Britain has supposedly “superior values”, ask them where bigotry sits among them, and why. Above all, listen – as I did with my three whose main concerns were about the local GP surgery and buses to town. They had been told both were much better in Asian areas, which some in the local media had made out were subsidised because Asian people lived there. In truth, most of the local Asian and white areas were mired in much the same poverty and poor services, something they seemed to take on board during our discussion – by the end of which they at least promised to vote differently. It is from finding common issues - not difficult in our grossly unequal society - that bridges can be built and barriers broken down, and the very real problems faced by people of all races can begin to be genuinely tackled.

Listening though is not agreeing. It is about understanding in order to effect change: never become complicit. Challenge prejudiced decisions at work or in the community. Speak out when someone makes a racist statement with the implication that, as another white person, you must feel the same way. Don’t go along with a bigoted joke – though rather than denouncing the teller, ask them why it is funny, ask them why they thought you would find it amusing and how they would feel about a joke like that told about them. Most people are good-natured enough that if you peel back the edifice of division created by all manner of extrinsic factors, they do not see the Other, but rather recognise another human being. (Alongside this though, we might exclude the fascist leaders and organisers - some will not be won over, and it is important to recognise this too and never, ever compromise with their vile ideologies.)

All lives matter, yes, but it’s black lives that are being taken. Understand that the call for equality is just that, nothing more – though be prepared for those who will see it as a threat to their status and authority even.

If you are a white person, like me, we can help make a difference even by just making clear to other white people that we don’t share their views, and that their assumption we do is offensive to us. If they play the old card that the problem isn’t with black or brown skinned people but that they want that nonsense they call integration rather than multiculturalism, ask them what they mean – every single one of us is different. I may share the same skin tone as you, but our tastes, our likes and dislikes, the things that make us who we are could be wildly different, while if they bothered to talk to someone from a different ethnic background, they could be very surprised at how much they have in common. There are many injustices and wrongs in this world - why add to them by being racist? Or by accepting racism as somehow being inevitable?

Listen to black and other ethnic minority friends, colleagues, neighbours and others, but equally don’t assume that they will want to tell you their personal experiences. You don’t need to have a child abuse survivor recount their abuse to know it is wrong and act against it. Similarly with racism. If someone feels able and wishes to tell you their story, fine, be honoured that they wish to share it with you, but don’t expect it or require it. Just be an ally - be a comrade. 

And as one black American writer has pleaded, as black people are often raised with the mantra that they need to be twice as good (as white people) to fit into society, if it is going to be like that, please can white people be twice as kind - twice as thoughtful about what our neighbours of colour may be going through encountering things we simply don't. Our white ancestors created this awful problem - but we can sort it, or begin to, not by beating ourselves up about the past (though equally not blindly celebrating it either), but by embracing our neighbours with different skin tones and cultures, by learning about them and looking for the things that bind us together.

Racism damages lives, destroys them even, cuts them short – and it is the accumulation of the often small acts in themselves that build up to legitimise the harm. Hitler’s concentration camps did not just spring into their awful existence overnight – years of gradually insulting and slowly dehumanising Romanies, Jews and others normalised the hatred, so much so that many camp guards actually believed they were committing an act of good when they forced victims into gas chambers. And so it goes that every act of hatred, or ignorance, no matter how small, needs to be challenged.

In the end, in our society with its imperialist past and racist now, our white privilege is the privilege of standing on the shoulders of thieves and murderers who conquered the world and fashioned it to our advantage. Our white privilege is the privilege of centuries of accumulated wealth and the multitude of benefits that go with that. Our white privilege is the privilege of not being black.

And we need to be utterly ashamed of that fact, and we need to listen to our black sisters and brothers and collectively and individually work to create a world that is better and happier for all of us, black and white alike, and the identity that we all share - the battered, fragile but ultimately compassionate and loving one called the human race.

Class Hatred

Classroom war

The class war came into the classroom last week with the appalling skewing of the English A-level results to favour private schools over the state sector, potentially locking masses of 18 year olds into the ossified, servile social class positions our elitist Masters deem them fit for. 

Many students predicted to achieve A-results have often seen these reduced to Bs or Cs or even Ds,often resulting in the loss of university places for the coming academic year. Perhaps particularly perniciously, the algorithms applied by the regulator Ofqal, using previous school statistics, have decided that some of those due to sit exams would not have turned up in any case and so have applied "Uncertificated" results - as good as simply not having an A level at all. In all, 40% of pupils - about 300,000 people - received lower than predicted grades, with those attending state schools and colleges badly hit.

By contrast, not a single entrant from Eton had a single grade reduced - doubtless on the grounds that none of them would have missed the exams if they were poorly as Nanny would have sat them on their behalf. (This in spite of the fact that many private schools work to the Cambridge International A-Level, a course deemed by this Government as too easy to be valid in state schools...)

With deadlines looming urgently for university admissions, rather than celebrating achivements after years of study and work, life plans are now on hold or being revised drastically downwards for hundreds of thousands of young people, predominantly from poorer backgrounds. The class war waged by the self-entitled rich elite has potentially devastated a generation's life chances .

Given the covid crisis and the closure of schools from mid-March, this was always going to be a difficult year for resolving the academic results of courses where exams due to take place could not happen. An approach combining logic, common sense and compassion was vital given the impact that the results would have on the long-term prospects of the students involved. In previous years, the approach taken by the Education Department has been to compare exam outcomes with predictions based on previous assessments - with the integrity of the exams based on how closely or not they matched the predictions. With much previous work having been marked in the classroom and mock exam results and teachers' assessments available, it should surely have followed that there would not be any need for any radical revision of predicted outcomes. Any competent Education Secretary would have made the decision to go with these.

However, our Education Secretary is one Gavin Williamson, MP, a man who as Defence Secretary backed the Saudi Arabians bombing of Yemen in spite of warnings of war crimes. Then he ridiculously implied that back in the 1980s Jeremy Corbyn was a Czech spy, apparently in an attempt to deflect criticism of his own soliciting of a £30,000 donation from the wife of a former Vladimir Putin Minister. 

So little compassion or common sense there. And as for his competence - before being elected to Parliament, Gavin "ran" a ceramics company that briefly rose to infamy when it produced a range of pottery to celebrate the Royal Wedding of Charles and Camilla - unfortunately firing every last piece with the wrong date!

Nanny will sort it.

Yet now in his rather inappropriate Education role, this moron saw fit to to declare that the algorithms applied to A level students' classroom assessments, which shoehorned individual results into crudely designed national quotas, were in fact perfectly robust and should be left unchanged. The towering Cabinet intellectual claimed that there would be a grave danger that such pupils would run the risk of over-promotion in the workplace were their results to be reviewed and upgraded.

Williamson and his boss Boris Johnson have of course subsequently been running in circles to try to remedy the chaos they have created. With characteristic world-beating bullshittery, they have set up something called a "Gold Command" to sort out the mess: though after publishing the appeals criteria for students to use, they withdrew it hours later, leaving many bewildered and panicking at the rapidly diminishing time left to resolve their grades. Williamson has to time of writing continued to flap and flounder and say he is "very sorry", while the PM, who promised to take personal charge of the crisis, has..erm... gone on holiday.

How could we have ever expected better from this Government? This is after all a group effectively coralled by Dominic Cummings, who believes that ability and achievement is down more to genetic breeding (i.e., of his class) than teaching or effort. The last thing they want is people from other classes to partake of that dangerously intoxicating chalice of education. What ideas might they get in their muddled serf-heads?

  

Johnson - the Eton days

Kafka has nothing on this elitist regime of lazily smug, sleazy sociopaths - the irony that they are literally the most useless group of people from any party assembled around the Cabinet table is sadly lost on their super-sized egos. And yet even now, in spite of all the unprecedented deaths, corruption, sleaze, racism, blatant lies, misogyny and sheer incompetence, the Conservative Party remains pretty much as far ahead as ever in the opinion polls of the largely silent Labour "opposition".

But change will come - younger generations are distinctly more left wing in their outlook and aspirations for future society as the current one increasingly fails them in providing decent employment, affordable education or housing, and now can't even get their exam results right. As the banners waved by demonstrating pupils today made clear, the damage done to them at this crucial moment in their young lives will not be soon forgotten by them or by their friends, families and relatives. Boris may fluster and bluster, but some things can't be explained away or made up as they go along. 

It is a crying shame that Starmer is left staring like a rabbit caught in headlights as the government should be on the ropes over its blatant social elitism, but others outside parliament are already taking up the torch of opposition. With over four years of Tory rule to go, it is outside of Westminster that the new struggles are already being shaped. The 18 year olds at the centre of this storm may play a leading part in shifting the paradigm firmly towards deep-seated social change - not only in education, but across society as a whole.

And as for Gavin, over-promoted and under-performing, perhaps it's time to get back to the pots. Perhaps this time with a calendar.

Into The Void

Perpetually worried - Keir Starmer stares into the centrist void...

Who remembers Bill Rogers?

He was the quiet one, modestly titling his long lost autobiography Fourth Among Equals - no Caesar Augustus he, one of the joint leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the breakaway from the Labour Party in 1981.

Headed by heavyweight former Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Dr David Owen, Rodgers, a former Transport Secretary, was the final member of the "Gang of Four" and was seen as the organiser of the SDP, which boasted new fangled initiatives like letting members join using credit cards and phone banks.

Under its collective leadership, the party initially pitched itself as a left of centre alternative to the overtly socialist leadership of Labour under Michael Foot from 1980 to 1983. Later, however, it  shifted during the sole leadership of Owen to a more rightwards "tough but tender" approach where the emphasis was much more technocratic, with the Doctor loftily holding forth his diagnoses of rampant incompetence on the part of the increasingly creaky Thatcher administrations. Often causing ructions among his Liberal Allies, Owen's pitch was firmly on the Tories' own terms - his "social market" was a conscious decision to operate on their ground, implying, ultimately, that he could be a better Conservative than the slavering followers of the wild-eyed Thatcher as she moved into full Caligula mode.

Ultimately, of course, the Liberal-SDP Alliance ended in utter rancour. After a disappointing result in the 1987 election left the SDP with just 5 MPs, a majority of the membership voted to merge with the Liberals. Owen refused to have anything to do with it and briefly created a "continuing SDP" which was wound up after polling behind the Monster Raving Looney party in a Merseyside by-election in early 1990. The Doctor exited elected politics and ended up aptly as a cross-bencher in the Lords, while Rodgers followed his other Gang members into what became the Liberal Democrats, leading them in the Lords for several years and happily backing the 2010 to 2015 coalition of austerity with the Conservatives.

His relevance today stems from his comments on a BBC "reunion" programme a little while before the European referendum in 2016. Interviewed with Williams and Owen about their reasons for their 1981 adventure (which had been dramatised as a successful London stage play) the now Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank opined that British politics had been "broken" then as it was again but, crucially, in spite of the surging UKIP and previous upswings for the BNP and street demos by the EDL, "politics will get back to normal soon enough."

His Lordship was perhaps expressing hope as much as prediction, but his complacency is readily explicable and not without some merit. For, while the SDP itself collapsed after barely six years' existence, its purpose - to stop an overtly socialist Labour Party being elected to office, was powerfully and successfully achieved.

First under the former leftwing firebrand Neil Kinnock and ultimately under the narcissism of the Blair leadership, Labour reacted to the SDP's brief but damaging insurgency and the accompanying four terms of Conservative governments by shedding its socialism, jettisoning commitments to large scale public ownership and wealth redistribution. In their place came an almost fervent advocacy of market economics, public services outsourced to the supposedly efficient private sector and a relentless focus on courting centrist voters.

By the late 90s "New Labour" Chancellor Gordon Brown was making a virtue of following Tory spending plans and deregulating the financial sector, while Peter Mandelson smooched with the rich and not-so-beautiful, whispering seductively that he was "intensely relaxed" about their being filthy rich. Unions were cowed into partnership agreements with no strike clauses while academics like Anthony Giddens lauded Blair's "Third Way", a faux centrist philosophy of a supposedly conflict-free society.

It was the emergence of inequality on a scale unknown in a century as well as Labour's strategy of taking working class voters for granted during these years that led to a slow but steady leakage of support away from the party and directly into the arms of far right populists like the neofascist BNP and later the revanchist UKIP. For the truth was that it was under these conditions that the working class became detatched from the Labour Party.

Many may have switched to not voting at all, but, alienated from the economic boom sucked up by the wealthy through the first decade of the 21st century and forced to compete with immigrant labour, the lure of xenophobic memes well and truly nurtured by the media was to lead in time to the Brexit vote. "Taking back control" wasn't only about asserting British independence from the EU; it was, perhaps ironically given some of the Leave leadership, a full-on rebuke to the liberal Establishment - which, too late, semi-awoke to the patronsingly labelled "left behind".

Yet the period that saw British politics slide into chaos from the Expenses scandal of 2008, the recession of the same year and the austerity of the following years, fostered not only a revolt on the right of politics - the Left was on the march too, a process that culminated in the breathtaking rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in the autumn of 2015. Simultaneously the party saw its membership rocket to well over half a million members, becoming the largest political organisation in Europe. In spite of two attempts to remove him by recalcitrant rightwing Labour MPs, who remained the majority of the parliamentary group, Corbyn endured through the now-revealed sabotage of party staffers in the 2017 general election to deliver the party's best result in almost two decades, depriving the Tories of their majority at the same time.

Lord Rodgers' hope of a return to normal seemed remote indeed. But, facing the rise of  powerfully ideological forces on both their flanks, the Political Class rallied around a protracted campaign undermining Corbyn again and again, while ceding the Tory Party to the rightist populism of Boris Johnson, which ultimately saw off UKIP and its briefly popular successor, the Brexit Party. That Labour still turned in a 32% vote share last December - higher than Brown or Miliband achieved during their leaderships and, in vote terms, better than Blair himself achieved when he won in 2005 - is little short of a miracle, and proof perhaps that, however devastating the outcome was in terms of seats (a relatively moot point given that our electoral system is as rational as a turn on the roulette wheel), a large movement remains for genuine socialism.

But, just as they made the anti-Corbyn narrative before the election, the Labour right have happily fashioned a new one post-polls. In this, Brexit had nothing to do with the sharp decline in the party's showing after their Brexit speaker, Keir Starmer, persuaded the NEC to over-rule Corbyn and campaign for a second vote on EU membership. In spite of the clear evidence on the doorsteps and in the results that Farage's Brexit Party drew enough support from Labour to deliver dozens of seats to Johnson, especially along the so-called Red Wall, the outcome is blamed entirely on Corbyn. Anything from anti-Semitism to "having too much in the manifesto" (Starmer's argument) has been deployed to explain the outcome. Almost surreally, former leader Ed Miliband has been commissioned to analyse and report on why Labour lost, in spite of the party polling almost a million more votes and a larger vote share than it achieved under his tenure.

In spite of his relatively comfortable victory in the leadership contest, three months in Starmer appears to have lost none of the Labour right's long-brewed vitriol. While his challenges to Boris Johnson during the covid crisis have hit home a few times over the chaotic handling of initiatives like track and trace and the late care homes lockdown, such passion as he has managed to muster has seemed far more focussed on the Left of the party and on Corbyn's legacy in particular.

Still light on any detail, Starmer has backslid on Labour's promises of wealth redistribution, signalled a likley retreat on the groundbreaking Green New Deal and proclaimed the party to be under new management. His Corbynite leadership rival, Rebecca Long Bailey, was ostensibly sacked from her Shadow Education role over an allegedly anti-Semitic tweet (in which she disseminated an Independent newspaper's interview with actor Maxine Peak). But by many accounts the real rift was over her wish to support the teachers' unions opposition to Government attempts to force them back into the classroom while the pandemic was still raging - Starmer, fearful of not being "constructive" wanted to support the government instead.

This week has seen the purge of Corbynism reach new depths with a legal settlement the party's lawyers advised against and now rumours that Starmer plans to expel the former leader himself from the parliamentary party.

Lord Rodgers may yet, it seems, have his wish of a return to "normal". Two parties, two sides of the same capitalist coin, endlessly rotating around a status quo, shoving it first a little one way and then the other to contain and neutralise those on both sides of the divide they straddle.

Containment - but for how long?

The notion that some centrist settlement - the polite comfortable certainties of the Major and Blair years - can be brought back and that, somehow, as if by magic, the very policies and even some of the people who fostered the crises of Britain will yet provide the solution - is beyond risible. Indeed, it is insulting to the victims of a decade of austerity and poverty, lost life-chances and premature death.

The risk of course is this - if there is no vehicle like the Labour Party to provide hope for a fairer society, for a tomorrow that achieves social justice and effectively tackles the environmental crisis, the currents of disillusion will not dissipate: like any tide, they will still gather and push until they find a new direction, one which, as past flirtations with the hard right have shown, will decidely not provide in any way a happy outcome.

Many on the Left fear Keir Starmer is a reincarnation of Tony Blair. Yet in truth he is far more akin the SDP's Dr Owen - almost delighting in a lack of any underpinning vision or ideology, but instead "forensically" scoring points over the contents of Government briefings - as if, this time, the modern Social Democrats rather than breaking away, have stayed and seized control of the Labour machine. An almost Stockholm syndrome-like atmosphere prevails - don't challenge this appalling Government's sociopathic behaviour over covid, its nepotistic dishing out of public contracts to its mates and shameless lack of values. Instead, tell Johnson and Co how you welcome what they're trying to do - just show them how to do it a bit better.

Where is the anger at tens of thousands of needless deaths and the failure to plan for the economic catastrophe that seems to loom ahead? How can we mobilise to campaign for public services when the Leader of the Opposition can't even rouse himself to condemn Tory legislation that, as Corbyn predicted, has now opened the NHS up to overseas ownership and control? Where is the will to fight racism when Starmer's immediate reaction to the toppling of the Bristol slaver's statue was to castigate demonstrators for being inappropriate? What is there to get out on the doorsteps about when the promise is of a pruning of "too many" policies seeking justice in a country where "normal" means 25,000 rough sleepers on the streets each and every night?

Little wonder that the party is reportedly losing many of its members, particularly among the crucial younger and BME demographics - where it overwhelmingly led the Tories last December. Many others seem to be following suit and Labour languishes 4% behind the Tories in recent polls - the mirror image of Corbyn's lead at the equivalent stage in the last parliament.

Starmer has been gushingly praised by the liberal press for his technocratic Question Time inquisitions of the increasingly truculent and lazily out-of-his-depth Johnson. Maybe so, yet as he stares with his seemingly perpetual look of worry across the despatch box, this strangely bloodless Labour leader would do well to check that he is not in truth simply gazing into a great big, gaping centrist void.

Contemplating Normal - Bill Rodgers (left) breakfasts with David Owen and Roy Jenkins.

Cold Blue Eyes: Make It One for Covid...

Drinking in pubs resumed at 6 a.m. this morning in England as Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed back to "normality" in spite of the UK death toll from Covid19 remains stubbornly higher than the combined European Union members. The Tories have been accused of pushing the country back to "normality" to satisfy the profits of their funders ahead of the safety of the public.

It's quarter to breakfast

Everyone's in the place

Including you and me.

So set 'em up Gove 

You obsequious bell-end

I think you should know

That you're not my friend, 

At the end of this dire episode

So make it one for blue Boris and one more

For covid.

I've got the routine
Put more fake news in the machine
I'm feeling so bad
Can't you make the stats easy... less sad???
I could tell you a lot
But none of it true, you old toad
Just make it one for blue Boris, and one more
For covid...

You know I talk shit,
but Mikey we're a great fit
And hid all these deaths we kept off TV.
So when I get boozed, won't you listen to me
'Til I've snoozed away
For my doze on the commode?

Make it one for blue Boris and one more
For covid.

Well that's how it goes
And Mike, I know you're gettin' anxious to close...
In on wasted old me,
So hope you didn't mind my not paying the fee
But this truth that I found,
It's gotta be drowned
Or the voters might explode.
So make it one more for blue Boris and one more
For covid...

The long, it's so long, the long, very long.... Oh God...

Johnson with ally Tim Martin, owner of Weatherspoons, who initially refused to pay his staff during lockdown and angrily told them to get other jobs. He also briefly tried to stay open during lockdown.

The CovidWealth

I watched a program about coronavirus in Italy last night. So sad, seeing an 18 year old guy on a ventilator and a teenage daughter sobbing with fear over the safety of her two doctor parents. While here we have Bournemouth and in the USA people coughing over others to proclaim their right to not wear masks.

I remember the start of the Aids pandemic. It was new. It touched gay men especially, at a time when they were stigmatized even more than now, some even having been to jail for their sexuality in the not so distant past.

And I remember the panic, the fear and discrimination. I remember the plastic gloves put on the board in the staffroom where I worked in Liverpool for us to wear in case a customer bled on some of the building society's money. I remember the obscure iceberg adverts and the prejudicial bile smeared over tabloid front pages. The horror when Diana touched "these people".

And I remember the dead. So very many of them.

There was prejudice aplenty and alongside that discrimination and lack of care. But one thing stands out - no one doubted Aids was real. No one said it was invented or caused by TV ariels or whatever. No one said it was made up. No one said it didn't pose a danger, although admittedly there was plenty of misunderstanding and exaggeration, a good dollop of it the product of homophobia.

But now, 30 to 35 years on, as covid spreads, what has happened to us? Tens, hundreds of thousands die while millions have been on ventilators or at death's door, yet tens of millions more ignore simple safety measures, demand the right to have a haircut or get to a pub. They've not been sick. They don't personally know any corpses. They want a f***ing burger and they want it now.

We shouldn't be surprised. For 30, 40 years, our rulers have told people to look after themselves.  No such thing as society, community is the nostalgically misplaced wetdream of smug liberals' imaginations. If you have a hard time, it's the fault of migrants, shirkers, malingerers and thieves.

The private has replaced the public. The individual trumps the collective.

So if you've not been sick.... Or maybe even if you have been, mildly... Other people's problems aren't yours, though maybe they are inconveniences, problems in themselves. Why should you stay at home, or wear a mask, or miss a pint or haircut or the sales...?

It's actually wildly against human nature not to care, not to help. The folk who claim otherwise are misguided or signed up sociopaths. Our nature is to pull together, to hold each other up. The archaelogical table, historical records, psychology, even faith... All speak to the essence of homo sapiens being our social nature, our compassion and empathy, our ability to see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others.

Apart of course from when we've been subjected ceaselessly to propaganda saying we don't, that we are inherently selfish and need to look after ourselves as otherwise no one will. When we have been excluded, stigmatized, fed a diet of hate by supposedly responsible media and with ultimately anti-social "social media" amplifying rumour, innuendo, conspiracy, threat and downright falsehood multiple times over, the common breaks down and the individual stands, and falls, alone. Thatcher's legacy comes finally to its toxic fruition in a bleak, terrifying wasteland.

But set aside our inherently good Nature, our compassion and empathy. Atomise our society, look inwards and destroy the solidarity and deny the common good, and one day the problem, the barrier bayed at by the Angry, the scapegoat driven into the Wilderness...
Today it may seem a ridiculous thought, but it could so very easily be you.

The Merchant

A crowd in Bristol yesterday tore down a statue of the 18th century slaver Edward Colston

and threw it into the River Avon. Colston founded many public buildings and institutions in

they city on the money he made from trading nearly 90,000 African slaves and from goods 

laboured on by them. The statue had been the subject of controversy for some time, with 

arguing even now that he should be remembered as a great philanthropist. Supporting the

Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, the crowd took matters into their own hands.

THE MERCHANT

In he goes, into the water,
Into the Sea
This Merchant Of Death
Touting slavery.

Commemorated, celebrated
O'er three hundred years
For a legacy of Empire's
Bloody Ocean of Tears.

Built on black backs
This memorial scar
An idol of vain Self
In dirty copper.

In he goes, into the water,
Into the Sea.
And history's unchained,
Unbound. And free.

Sarajevo On The Potomac

The Obama Presidency sadly masked the enduring nature of US empire with a purely symbolic change - the wars, racism, inequality and poverty continued largely as before. Yet the appalling carnage of the last week points up how completely Trump has shifted the narrative from one of hope for a better future, however vague, to a grim fascination with division, oppression and violence.

When he held up a Bible the other day, his sneering face with its narrowed eyes somehow told you that he'd be far more likely to beat you on the head with it than actually read its contents. This display was the epitome of what his craven mate Nigel Farage refers to as "muscular Christianity" - nothing to do with the Gospels' messages of love and justice, but everything to do with sanctifying a cultural mindset of White Power. A monoculture, exclusionist, racist to the core, even if so many of those fronting and following this barren, joyless concept somehow typify the unhealthy mundanity of the stupid white men they usually are.

Trump even now is not Hitler - he is not as coherent or planned or darkly intelligent. Rather, he is the Milosevic or, yet worse, the Radovan Karadzic of our time, but with far more firepower and no imaginable UN peacekeeping force on the horizon. Bathed in the flames he has fired, Washington D.C. so easily morphs into today's Sarajevo while Minneapolis teeters towards a future Srebernica.

The savage Bosnian war in the mid-90s, sparked as the federal state of Yuogoslavia unravelled in a matter of weeks, is as apt a comparison as any, however chilling the prospect. For, with its suborning of Christian symbols to promote racial supremacy, its "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims, its massacres in Visegrad, Prijedor, Foca, Srebrenica and scores of other once peaceful Balkan valleys, its tinpot warlords and its narcissistic, psychopathic  President - this was always the canary in the coalmine, screaming out where the post-Soviet neoliberal "New World Order", as Bush senior lauded it, was always going to end up.

Well, destination reached, and it has long been in view. This is the tomorrow these men promised and many others enabled, whether by collusion or indifference.

You are here.

Now.

What will you do about it?

Travels In Time And Space: Cummings to be new Dr Who!

 Who?

Dominic Cummings, adviser to Boris Johnson, has landed the prestigious part of the new Doctor Who.

BBC producers insist that this is not to mollify the eugenics advocate and former night club manager's plans to castrate the corporation, but is rather down to his ability to be physically present in two spaces at the same time, as well as his astonishing power to cure covid without so much as a twist of his sonic screwdriver.

Who could have failed to be moved to tears just four weeks ago, as the BBC gave his wife, Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield, a special slot to talk about how she had fallen to her knees and begged the Timelords to spare her gravely ill partner? Who wouldn't have had to stifle a sob as she recounted how, after rushing home and bravely nursing her, he struggled breathlessly with the apparent insolence of the covid virus in daring to infect a genetically superior body like his ripped torso? As the presenters choked back their grief, she compellingy described his existential battle, seemingly confined in their London home, something she later wrote more about in her rightwing magazine.

Yet at the same time, neighbours of Dom's parents were peering over their hedge 260 miles away on Teeside to observe the Master Race's mightiest hoofer bopping to a high volume outdoors rendition of Abba's Dancing Queen in his age-vulnerable Mum and Dad's garden. Given that he had until then been apparently hovering between this world and the next, some have speculated if he may have been undergoing some form of regeneration process.

It was this astonishing ability of Cummings to alter the very fabric of truth and reality, while also dispersing any traces of shame or hypocrisy at a sub-atomic level, that apparently swung him the part. "And he comes complete with eccentric clothing," a BBC spokesperson enthused, though adding wistfully, "At least, when he actually wears some."

She did go on to admit though that scriptwriters are in crisis conference trying to work out how to explain to Cummings that "exterminate!" is in fact the catchphrase of his dalek enemies and that it would not be a good plot twist for the new Doctor to put them in charge of managing care homes.

A World Made Small

Once I dreamt
Of galaxies of fire
Streaming stars of possibility
And supernovas of desire.

A future potent
with hope of a dawn
that would never set
Never darken again.

But you with golden locks
And loafing, languid mind
In oak-dark boardrooms
Spun while all declined

Exhaling tyrant breath
In dreadful mirth
At fate's misfortune -
Your accident of birth.

Bumbling and fumbling
Like an adolescent in the dark,
In a world made small
By your jolly jape, your prefect's lark,

Like a cuckoo in straw,
You might bluster and fluster
And wheeze and deny
With all the deceit you can muster.

But the lyre is broken,
Curtains torn in Empire's hall,
Your days draw late
Whispers echo in coming Fall.

With empty heart and hollow eyes
What spectres you must flee,
In this once-sceptred Isle
Set on a septic sea.

But no Antony, only Brutus
Shall the tin throne attend,
A kindless, covid kiss
Thy final, foolish, bloody end.

Lockdown: Humanity On Notice

Empty city. 

 

As we stumble about wondering what we are allowed to do and where we can go, here are some scenes from York in simpler times of total lockdown a couple of weekends ago. Normally packed streets devoid of all but the occasional passing jogger or cyclist. And a little gargoyle waiting at the Minster for work to resume one day.

 

I am fortunate indeed to have this beautiful environment easily in range of a walk for my permitted daily exercise, doubly so to experience it so deserted. It speaks to how well people are continuing to respond to the need to protect not just ourselves but our vulnerable fellow-citizens from the coronavirus. 

 

And also, as I could hear pigeons rather than people as I walked along Parliament Street, it points up how quickly nature will fill any vacuum left by humans.

 

Perhaps we are on notice.

 

 

 

At Tyrants' Fall

Who were you?
What did you do?
And what did you see
With those haunting, haunted eyes
That plead even now with me?

Perhaps it was just a big boys' game
Or you longed so much to be the same
As the Neu-Men in dark blue
Their jutting jaws and snarling teeth
Calling out to you.

Mephisto's deadly bargain dies
With Night-time's wilfull lies.
Eir asks for the soldier-boy
And begs the gods tender mercy
To the Monster's chosen toy.

Who were you?
And what did you know
At the bitter end of it all?
A thousand years not to be
And still-life to live, at tyrants' fall.

75 years ago, the Battle of Berlin had just ended and in less than a week the war in Europe would be over. But for many of all nations, their personal struggles to comprehend themselves and their past were just beginning. 

From January 1945, the Nazis had stripped the schools of all boys and some girls aged 13 and above to fight alongside elderly conscripts in the Volksstrum, the People's Army. In the previous year, a special 10,000 strong SS Division had been created of 16 and 17 year olds and, deployed to Normandy, became infamous for its particularly cruel treatment of prisoners. 

As many as 25,000 German children took part in the defence of Berlin with casualty rates in many units as high as 80%. Elsewhere, a million school age troops were deployed with little training and often few weapons against far superior Soviet soldiers. Raised in Nazi schools and steeped in its mythology, they often fought to the bitter, fatal end. 

But many also survived. The Americans even took the surrender of an 8 year old boy. Their bewildered mixture of anger, fear and confusion is evident in their Prisoner of War photographs. Yet these children made old before their time were far from unique to the Second World War or to the Nazis: even today, there are around 250,000 child soldiers, 40% of them female and all of them frequently subjected to a wide range of physical and psychological abuse. Although declared a crime in international law after 1949, using children in war remains to this day a frequent stain on all humanity.