Underclass News

Those two sadly-departed organs of the State, the Coppersblog and Inspector Gadget, frequently opined that they spent too much police time on the psychodramas of the local underclass - Shayne would complain that Wayne was harassing her by text or on Facebook just because she'd been with Dwayne, Wayne would counter-complain etc etc. It was very hard to establish who was telling the truth and nine times out of ten would lead to "no further action".

This seems to be spreading to people who actually work for a living. A worrying trend.

It could of course be a sign of the End Times. 

"Obama said he would strengthen the middle class and introduce immigration reform"

Thus BBC Radio Four on the State of the Union address. 

Given that "immigration reform" is Newspeak for "legalise the illegals and invite their friends and family", it seems unlikely the middle class will be strengthened.

The wealthy class, very probably.

"What's Wrong With The Left?" Part 296

Andy Newman at Socialist Unity is worried :

"I think there is another underlying problem, in writing about what the left is doing,  because the left really isn’t doing much at the moment which engages with the political mainstream. I will write a longer and more considered article on this, but I am interested in what our readers think. Has the left lost its way?"

Well there's a surprise. What could the matter be, I wonder ? In a week when the statutory consultation period for large-scale redundancy has been reduced from 90 days to 45, and the Agricultural Wages Board ('which permits the fixing of minimum wage rates and terms and conditions for agricultural workers') has been abolished, all with hardly a ripple of opposition, what could a left-winger in the UK possibly find to worry about except US gun control and gay marriage ?

But if Andy doesn't understand what's going on, his commenters can fill him in :

Alan Gibbons : 

"The Tories have been relatively successful at slicing away at public services. There has been no ‘big bang’ provoking a generalised fightback... anti-welfare rhetoric has struck a nerve with some sections of the population. The second national anti-cuts march, while substantial, was smaller than the first...what worries me more, from the perspective of somebody involved as an independent activist in the fight against the cuts and particularly the campaign to save the public library service, is that the Left looks much older, greyer, divided and less confident ..."

You're telling me ... I think this post needs a link.

"The time of salami-slicing in public services seems to be coming to a close and whole areas of public spending may be axed, as shown by Newcastle’s withdrawal from the Arts. The assault on redundancy, the privatisation of the NHS, the proposed onslaught on the teaching unions and accelerating attacks on benefits show a weak government with a fragile mandate going ahead regardless with an offensive strategy."

A slight diversion here - I think some areas of public spending OUGHT to be axed. The dynamic of the last sixty years in local government is

a) central government puts statutory obligation on local government
b) gives them some money to fund it.

Until a local authority gets far more of its money from central government than from local taxation, and this is cancerous to local democracy, because you don't really get what you vote for. As a school governor, for example, I saw our Conservative local authority zealously implementing Labour's hideous "Every Child Matters" agenda, and wondered what the point of a Tory vote was. If central government want something done, they should do it themselves.

So anyway, I wouldn't mind if some of the legislative nagombi (how many diversity consultants) was dropped. Alas, this isn't going to happen any time soon. What's more likely is that the local authority (LA) staff will end up being outsourced to whichever company promises the LA that they can do the same stuff as the council did, with the staff having the same terms and conditions (except pensions - a not inconsiderable point, as LA pensions are index-linked final salary i.e. what you don't see in the private sector any more) - and all at 10-15% less cost ! I invite the reader to imagine at whose expense these savings will come.

I digress.

Nadia Chem - fine old English name, but she talks sense (though should that be "overestimated"?) :

"What has been missed is the reality that the working class might not have the confidence to resist such an offensive. The atrophy of working class organization at workplace and community level cannot be underestimated... the locus of the offensive has been as much in a general attack on living standards as in cuts. This has generated an enormous well of bitterness but little active resistance... the fact that this attack on living standards started under the Labour government from 2006 weakens Labour’s ability to grasp the bitterness."

Mr Newman himself :

"My experience of knocking doors for Labour, is that people are open to a traditional Labour message, but not with any real conviction that labour would be even different, let alone better."       

Trust the people, Andy.

"I fear that much of the left – including the so-called revolutionaries – have actually given up on social change"

I wouldn't say that. We've seen unprecedented social change, and will see more.

BrokenWindow :

"the Left is as atomised as the workers collectively are atrophied. Underpinning this is an absence or failure to theoretically engage in wider debates about globalisation and nation states... most of all it must re-engage with the people it hates the most,the young working class white men and women who have gone to the right."

So there are plenty of people who can see that there's a problem. But in 175-odd comments, no one seems to really know why they're up the Swanee.

"the best thing we could do for the cause is to recruit more people to unions/help install a sense of discipline/participate in community campaigns and start working where people are rather than where we want them to be." 

Of course ! Like good old  Boxer in Animal Farm, "I must work harder" ! If only we were better socialists...

Laban dropped into the comments a quote from the anthropologist Peter Frost (of 'Fair Women, Dark Men') :

"In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result, the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else, and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor."  

I think Mr Frost describes it pretty well. The UK business elite in 1940, as noted in Harold Nicolson's diaries, were prepared to go down in flames rather than see Hitler triumph. But now ... even "conservatives" like Boris Johnson and Michael Heseltine* "are no longer restrained by ties of national identity", let alone businessmen who've seen their incomes soar, both absolutely and relatively. This is why the end of the journey will soon be in sight.
    
Anyway, Andy (or his gofer, I know not) deleted the post in about minutes one. They don't want to know, and that's why they'll continue to get shafted - along with the rest of us.

Andy is at this moment involved in  an industrial dispute between Carillion, an outsourcer, and their many Asian employees - mostly Goan Catholics and I'm sure good people (the details of the dispute make depressing reading - looks like third-world petty corruption is already here).

But you do have to wonder why people from half way round the world are needed to clean Swindon's hospital - especially as Swindon is a place where there are 30 applications for every vacancy in Next.

The answer to Andy's questions are literally staring him in the face - but there's none so blind as those who will not see.

    


* Heseltine gave a famous Spectator interview where, asked if he was worried about Britain being merged into a Greater Europe, replied "who now remembers the Heptarchy (the seven kingdoms of Saxon England)?" 

Economic Illiteracy - Media Edition

Great news !

"British retail sales grew more than expected in September after a surprise increase in sales of laptops and video games, the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday."

By strange chance, Laban bought a new laptop in September - and his youngest son also got a new games console as a reward for better-than-expected GCSE results, after a paternal promise the previous autumn which at the time seemed unlikely to ever need redeeming. Fair play though - he got the grades. Perhaps that made the sales difference ...

How good that must have been for British laptop and video console manufacturers !



Terrible news !

"In a blow to the government's aspirations for exports to lead a recovery, the trade gap – the difference between imports and exports – widened to almost £10bn in September, prompting warnings that already lacklustre economic growth for the third quarter will be downgraded."

Perhaps one day someone will put two and two together and recognise that, for as long as we continue not to make anything, strong retail sales are part of the problem, not part of a solution.

Class hatred

It's odd. For the last 50 years the middle-class Left has bemoaned the absence of spontaneous working-class political self-organisation.

But when it happens, they suddenly discover how much they hate the working class. The people who get all hot and bothered about people being called "chavs" are the same people who in online debate will mock the grammar, spelling and logic of EDL contributors or interviewees. Say what you like about the publicans who put together this (IMHO amusing) video, they don't pretend to be defenders of working people.

But on the "left" ... from Harpy's "ugly and vile" faces, to the bright boys in the video below, they all seem to be piling in. Can't understand it ... can you ?





(hat-tip - Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph)

Peter King - "Contemptible"

No one's less of a Rupert Murdoch fan than I, but believe it or not, there are actually worse people in the world - and when they slither out to join in the kick-fest the harsh light of publicity should be shone on them. When it comes to casting truckloads of stone on the Dirty Digger, let he who has the fewest sins chuck the first barrowful - and let he who is weighed down by sin keep his ugly, bloodstained mouth shut.

"Republican Congressman Peter King - who is chairman of the House homeland security committee and represents a constituency in New York that lost more then 150 people in the 9/11 attacks - called on Wednesday for an FBI inquiry.

"The thought that anyone would have hacked into the phones of either those who were killed, those who were missing, the family members, during that tragic time... is contemptible," he told the BBC on Thursday."

He thinks hacking into phones is bad, but blowing up Brits is cool :

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it."

There's loads more on Wiki - he seems to have been in up to his neck :

King did not meet Gerry Adams until 1984, four years after his dalliance with the IRA began. At this time he was friendly with Michael McKevitt, the common law partner of Bernadette Sands, sister of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. McKevitt was at the time a senior leader of the IRA and was its Quartermaster-General, in charge of arms acquisition. McKevitt planned a massive series of arms smuggling operations of weapons provided to the IRA by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi during the mid-1980s. During this time, King would stay in their home in Co. Louth while visiting Ireland and was also very close to the IRA's former Operations Officer in Belfast, Anto Murray, who was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping a suspected British spy. As Belfast Operations Officer, Murray planned or authorised every IRA bombing, shooting and killing in the city. King would stay with Murray and his wife Lucy during visits to Belfast and after Anto Murray was imprisoned, he hosted Lucy Murray on a tour of the Capitol when she visited the United States.

Nice ...

"He stopped supporting the IRA after being offended by Irish public opposition to the invasion of Iraq"

And I'm not sure why that makes him look like an idiot, but it does.

(He's all over the BBC. They'll use any stick to beat Murdoch - even one with blood all over it.)

New Club For Bradford

Bradford is to be home to a new high-profile club promoting positive pride among British Pakistanis.

Tonight sees the launch of the Pakistan Club, which already has the backing of big names including cricketing legend Imran Khan, politician Lord Nazir Ahmed, business tycoon Nighat Awan OBE and Bradford’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Naveeda Ikram.

This afternoon, international racing driver Adam Khan will be in Centenary Square signing autographs before the official launch event at City Hall which will be attended by about 130 people from across the UK.

When I looked at the T&A website earlier, the item had 92 comments, but they've all gone now. I wonder what they could have been about ?

Anyone from across the UK can join although it will be based in Bradford and be built in phases which include a restaurant, a private cinema, lounge, separate gyms for men and women – eventually there will also be a banqueting hall and library. The club’s founders are actively looking for a suitable site in the city to either build the club premises from scratch or to re-develop.

Membership is open to all Pakistanis or people of Pakistani origin, says Mr Ahmed - as long as they are aged over 18.

Alas, no one from Bradford English Club was available for comment.

The Contradictions Inherent In One Sentence

At Comment Is Free :

"The likely indictment of John Edwards for misuse of campaign funds is the final blow for a rare champion of economic justice"

"No Irish Need Apply"

The (American) liberal myth of 'No Irish Need Apply'.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

As every Brit liberal knows, the streets of 1950s London were full of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish' signs. Yet on the Web there's only one photo which looks as if it could be authentic - source unknown to me - and in an admittedly cursory trawl of the web I've not found any contemporary reports of them - just hundreds of "are we returning to the days of" blog posts and dozens of "my father came to London at a time when" pieces. You really would think that it might turn up in Hansard - I must take a look. Maybe it's yet another liberal myth aka libel against the native Brits. Not that there aren't similar signs to be seen in London to this day - only strangely, no one makes a fuss about them. Can't imagine why.



















(cropped photo from ruskin51's photostream)

Now I've got no real problems with an Asian family wishing to share their house with people of their own culture or ethnicity - or even rent it. You want as tenants/lodgers people you can trust, and as the late Emperor Claudius puts it 'the knee is nearer than the shin'. For good reasons, people tend to trust people who are like themselves, and as Robert Putnam points out :

"the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor"

But these signs are presumably illegal under British law. I suppose the reason we're not seeing these cases in the court reports is that the law was designed to stop natives putting up these kinds of advert.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert - Daily Mail Edition

In the Money section, Jonathan Portes (Gordon Brown speechwriter and author of the report "Migration: An Economic And Social Analysis", famously revealed by Andrew Neather as "aimed to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons") :

"There is not a single serious economic study that suggests immigration has had any significant impact on the employment of British workers. Immigration may have had some effect on wages, but not very much. A report last year from MigrationWatch found that unemployment is higher in those areas of England that have experienced the highest levels of immigration. True. But those areas had higher levels of unemployment to start with - so it wasn't the immigrants who caused it. Even more to the point, during the period MigrationWatch looked at, the areas with more immigration actually did better in terms of unemployment.

Nor are immigrants a drain on the state. Some immigrants claim benefits, use the Health Service, have children at school, commit crimes and so on. But they pay taxes too. And on average, they pay more in tax and use less in services than natives. This is hardly surprising since many, if not most, immigrants come here to work or study. So overall they reduce the tax burden on the rest of us. Fewer migrants will mean higher taxes or cuts in services."

Alas he gives no references for these remarkable claims. I point readers towards the ONS figures for unemployment by ethnicity.





















Given that "Mr Portes remains an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of immigration. He wrote a report for the Department of Work and Pensions last year rejecting claims that Eastern European workers had stolen the jobs of British counterparts, arguing Britons lacked the skills and motivation", I think we can probably take the attitude to his writings that Mary McCarthy took to Lillian Hellman's ("every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'").




I digress. In that same edition of the Mail, news section :

"Migrant crime wave revealed: Foreign arrests have almost doubled in just THREE years"

"The number of foreigners arrested for committing crimes in Britain has almost doubled in the past three years, police revealed today. Figures show that in 2010 more than 91,234 non-British nationals were held for crimes including murder, burglary and sexual offences. By contrast, only 51,899 foreigners were arrested in 2008 - meaning there has been a worrying increase of 76 per cent over the past three years."

Yes campaign denies it kept white actor off leaflets

(As seen in all papers.)

By Kunal Dutta

Monday, 4 April 2011

Tony Robinson: The actor's endorsement of the Yes campaign was printed on leaflets for the Home Counties, but not for London, where Benjamin Zephaniah was used instead.

Campaigners supporting the alternative vote have denied accusations that they "airbrushed" the white actor Tony Robinson out of leaflets distributed in London.

The campaign used Robinson's picture as an endorsement on literature in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Cornwall, but in London the leaflets featured the black poet Benjamin Zephaniah, prompting accusations from rivals that the Yes campaign was "ashamed" of the actor's backing.

Chinese Eugenics

Well strike a light :

In other sports, size is more important - and the government appears to be discreetly trying to influence this too. Top basketball coach Wang Libin says the government encouraged the exceptionally tall mother and father of Yao Ming, the 7ft 6in superstar of the American basketball league, to marry. They did the same for his own parents, and for him and his wife - both basketball players. Their daughter is only 15, but she is 6ft 4in tall and dreams of playing in the 2012 London Olympics. Now, he says, tall people are exempted from the one-child policy so that they can breed more tall offspring.

Hmm. If they'll do that for a few gold medals, what might they not do for a few Nobel-winning scientists ?

UPDATE - apparently a Chinese law of 1994 provides for the compulsory sterilisation of those who carry serious genetic disorders and wish to marry. "Wish to marry", eh - how quaint and old-fashioned that sounds to a Brit. I have to assume there aren't many Ed Milibands in China. In fact :

"it is illegal in almost every province for single women to have a child and that people who have children out of wedlock must pay "social compensation fees" (29 Feb. 2009, Sec.1.f). The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) reports that those who give birth to a child outside of marriage can face fines six to eight times the amount of their income from the previous year (US 31 Oct. 2008, 97). According to a 2005 article in Reproductive Health, very few children are born out of wedlock in China (11 Aug. 2005, 3)."

I'm not surprised. But has anyone told Andy Newman ?

Landlord Laments

I think it was the previous Conservative administration that changed the rules (with the best of intentions) so that housing benefit was paid direct to the landlord :

Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back.

And I'm presuming that it was Labour who changed them back again, doubtless with the best of intentions, and with results like this :

A north west London landlord was asked to house a single mum arriving from Nigeria and was told it would be her, plus one child, although it was later established that there were four children in the property. The tenant started off well and passed over the rent for a couple of months - then it stopped, building up arrears of around £3,000 which is where it stood when we were contacted by the landlord to evict her as he wanted her out to get a more reliable tenant. She was successfully evicted and, in this case, the money was eventually paid back although it did take a very long time and, unsurprisingly, it put the landlord off letting to housing benefit tenants again. The tenant in question? Well she went on to be re-housed by her local council!

How do you just 'arrive from Nigeria' and start claiming benefit ? I digress. But I have a feeling that despite their travails, mass immigration plus UK benefits must have produced many housing benefit millionaires among landlords in London and other large cities.

The law was brought in to empower tenants and make them feel part of the buy to let market place and there are many good tenants, however, there are still a large number that are not so conscientious. I wrote to Tony McNulty MP at the department for work and pensions at the end of 2008, expressing my concerns at the way the system currently works and it took him nearly 3 months just to acknowledge my letter and then his response was to insist that safeguards were in place to ensure it worked properly. I beg to differ.

An Ealing landlord emailed to say her tenant had started to claim housing benefit but had lied about how much she was receiving and when she was being paid so, after a few months of not receiving her rent, she rang Ealing housing benefit direct to find out what was happening. Due to the data protection act, they were unable to pass on any information but, as she was owed the equivalent of 8 weeks rent, she was able to apply to the council to be paid directly which she duly did. However, the tenant used her 30 days to object and, soon after the rent was paid over by the council, she left the flat without notice...

As the landlord in question quite rightly pointed out to Ealing council, her tenant had embezzled £2,600 of tax payers’ money and the tax payer loses out on many counts. Their reaction? They just laughed and said it happens all the time.

A tenant in receipt of housing benefit does not pass it on, waits for the landlord to apply to the council directly, waits 30 days for their objection to be heard and, as soon as the money is paid directly, they leave without notice. The council recognises that their system is being abused and yet it is not regarded as benefit fraud.

This one's impressive :

"Today, a landlord told us a tenant is withholding rent and sending it to Kosovo to fund the building of a house," says Shamplina. It is almost you-couldn't-make-it-up territory.

Mind, some of the tenants who do stump up might present other problems :

"The most common cases appear to be organising gangs looking for an easy money making scam. They take out a tenancy and then sublet to multiple occupants. The worst case we have dealt with was a three bedroom, one bathroom, semi detached house in North London which was found to have had 53 occupants, all illegal immigrants. They were mattresses literally littering the floors from wall to wall in every available space. The sanitation issues were stretched to say the least."

"Another case was of a lady who had a lovely two bedroom flat in Victoria. Her tenant paid six months rent up front but she later discovered that 18 sets of bunk beds had been put into her property and was being used as a youth hostel. A website in China was offering students visiting London accommodation at £20 per night"

Cognitive Dissonance Alert

Manchester Evening News :

Officers have received 23 calls from concerned parents since the first incident was reported less than a fortnight ago. The abduction bids have all taken place in Stockport. Most of the remaining calls were to report men acting suspiciously – such as driving slowly down streets where children were playing.

I could have sworn that driving slowly in streets where children are playing is what you're supposed to do.

Noah Fence

At the beginning of the meeting, David Cameron said "this is a national issue of the highest importance; it has both demographic and humanitarian aspects. In effect, we are the only western country that lacks a clear immigration policy. Today, we will start the discussion in order to correct this."

The prime minister added that the new law, drafted by Minister of Justice Ken Clarke, "should conform to our national interests, first and foremost providing security and ensuring the British and democratic character of the country."

"Illegal immigrants are endangering Britain's existence," he said. "The south of England has fallen under siege."

Foreign Minister William Hague and Home Secretary Theresa May discussed the possibility of sending some of the thousands of illegal African immigrants in London to African and European countries that are willing to accept them. Hague said he is talking to his European counterparts, but that it is unlikely that such a plan will succeed.

Gosh ... can this be real ?

The government held a special session this morning on various issues connected with illegal immigration.

What ... where am I ? Oh no ! It was all a dream !



"The government held a special session this morning on various issues connected with illegal immigration. Disappointment, directed mainly at Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was expressed at the fact that construction of the fence between Egypt and Israel would begin only in November.

The purpose of the fence is to block African infiltrators making their way into Israel via the Sinai Desert. Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharonovitch says there are some 150,000 illegal infiltrators, only 16 percent of whom are registered and known to the authorities."



Good fences make good neighbours, said Robert Frost's neigbour, and India seems to agree. They finished their fence across Kashmir ages ago.

The barrier itself consists of double-row of fencing and concertina wire eight to twelve feet (2.4–3.7 m) in height, and is electrified and connected to a network of motion sensors, thermal imaging devices and alarms in stretches where power supply is available. The small stretch of land between the rows of fencing is mined.

The Bangladesh barrier is proceeding apace :

The barrier is just under three meters high with the aim to stop infiltration of terrorists, prevent smuggling, and to prevent large scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh into neighbouring states. Under the former government of Khaleda Zia and the Islamic extremist Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh troops clashed with the Indian Border Security Force in an attempt to prevent fencing. Some indigenous Assamese fear that they, as a people, will be reduced to a minority if unabated infiltration continues.

Poor Assamese. Imagine how English people would feel if that happened to them.

Quote of The Day

Natalie Bennett :

"One of the things that I’ve noticed on the doorstep around St Pancras and Somers Town in this and previous election is the enthusiasm among the Somali community for democracy and engagement with it."

Alas, that enthusiasm doesn't seem to extend to the folks back home.

Quote of the Day

I thought the Bard of Burton Bradstock Barking called himself a socialist ?

"Everyone else in London benefits from multiculturalism and cheap labour..."

I can't remember when keeping wages low was an admitted benefit for a self-styled leftie. Even Jon Cruddas, while supporting mass immigration, dislikes the way it drives down wages - he just doesn't dislike it enough to actually do anything about it :

"... immigration has been used as an informal reserve army of cheap labour. People see this at their workplace, feel it in their pocket and see it in their community - and therefore perceive it as a critical component of their own relative impoverishment.

Objectively, the social wage of many of my constituents is in decline. House prices rise inexorably, and public service improvements fail to match local population expansion. At work, their conditions, in real terms, are in decline through the unregulated use of cheap migrant labour."

(via)

Grand Festival of Cognitive Dissonance

Rasputin - "Church in Ireland has lost all credibility"

(sponsored by Greenhouse and Stone-Throwing Monthly)


Mandelson "suffered from low self-esteem"

Smash Your Discrimination and Leave Ours Alone !

Who'd have thunk it ? India is cool with outlawing British forms of discrimination - we've just got to leave Indian forms of discrimination alone.

India is set to clash with Britain over Westminster's new Equality Bill which outlaws caste discrimination as a form of racism.

Ministers in London have become increasingly concerned about discrimination and persecution against lower caste Indians in Britain following a report last year which claimed thousands had been ill-treated because of their caste. The report, by the Anti-Caste Discrimination Alliance, surveyed 300 British Asians and cited cases of children being bullied at school, bus inspectors refusing to work with lower caste drivers, and employees being sacked after their bosses discovered their caste status.

Until now victims of caste discrimination in Britain have had no recourse to law. India also has legislation outlawing caste discrimination but is fiercely opposed to any comparison with racism. The Indian government has made its views known to British delegations at the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva and at a European Union-India Human Rights Dialogue last month.

"India's position on this issue has been clear and consistent. Caste and race discrimination are two separate issues and there is no case to equate the two. We are opposed to attempts at international fora to equate the issues," said an official source.

Obviously some forms of discrimination are more acceptable than others. It's the culture, innit ?


UPDATE - for those interested, I wrote about caste killing in India here, caste privilege (not what you'd think - there are government privileges/quotas for lower castes) in India here, and noted a caste killing in Europe here.

"We No Longer Own It"

The following, by BBC presenter Dotun Adebayo, was, according to 'Damon', a commenter at the Pickled Politics site, printed in the Voice newspaper in September 2008.

Damon's view of it : "It seems all kinds of people can feel this ”loss of hegemony”. When it’s articulated by the white working class (in places like East London) it’s usually called racism."

He also posts it somewhere Laban doesn't hang out at a great deal, the Billy Bragg forum.

I'll let it speak for itself, but I wonder - what would have been the career trajectory of a white BBC presenter writing such a piece, lamenting the loss of an earlier (John Major's ?) Brixton, mourning his dashed hopes that the area "would ever be white" or complaining that "all the shops are now owned by"? Would they still be at the BBC ?

WAVE BRIXTON GOODBYE.

There used to be a time when everyone knew that Brixton belonged to us.
We fought for it, and made love for it.
Some of us even died in that corner of the landscape that would ever be black.

It didn’t mean that white folks weren’t welcome, all that it meant is that they KNEW it was ours, the same way as when I go to Norfolk or Suffolk, or any of the shires, I know that it’s NOT ours.
I’m on my ‘p’s and ‘q’s when I go up country, because I don’t have the backative to claim it as mine. And all the youts know this, so they’ve got the bottle to shout out ”N*****!” from across the road when they see you walking down one of their village streets or quiet country lanes.

I don’t have a problem with that because I KNOW when I venture out there I’m in a white mans country and the white man makes the rules.
Brixton was different though. Babylon THOUGHT he made the rules until Brixton made a stand against the so-called Operation ‘Swamp 81′. As the late Bernie Grant MP would say, the police got a ”bloody good hiding” that time.

There were of course casualties on both sides. But at least the message was clear all around the country that Brixton belonged to us. And so did Tottenham. And so did Hackney and Stonebridge and Peckham and Handsworth and Moss Side and Cheetham Hill and St Paul’s, so on and so forth.

ROOTS

Where ever you had an inner city, you had a corner of England that would be forever Jamaican or Nigerian or Bajan or St Kittian. We didn’t just put down roots, we put down down-payments on those areas, or at least our parents did. And like the law states, if you own a piece of this green and pleasant land, it’s yours.
Nobody can take it away from you (unless you divert the mortgage payments to buy a Ferrari).
But 27 years on, Brixton no longer belongs to us. I went down there the other day and discovered another country. Oh, we were still evident. It wasn’t like ‘’spot the black man” but we no longer own it.
The bars, the clubs, the resturants and shops no longer belong to us. With the exception of a pattie shop or two, Brixton belongs to everybody but us. It’s the same in Tottenham and Hackney. We spend most of the money, but virtually the only things we own are barbershops and hairdressers.
We’ve got ourselves to blame. Look at the Asian community. They came here at more or less the same time we did. They didn’t just put downpayments on the areas they claimed, they bought them outright.
Often jointly, communally, together as one family. So when you go to Southall, Alperton, Ealing, Whitechapel, and the other London areas they own, it’s all about Indiashire, Londonistan and Bangla-Brick Lane. They own the houses, the businesses AND the councils.
So who do you think makes the rules in those areas? It’s not the Women’s Institute and the Rotary Club and the Freemasons, I can tell you. Forget the local parish church and the sound of Bow Bells, it’s the Hindu temples and the mosques that call the shots, and if the Imam wants to call the belivers to worship at five in the morning, that’s up to him.

Like I said, we’ve got ourselves to blame. We had it all in the palm of our hands and we threw it away. We could have been contenders. We could have controlled entire neighbourhoods, businesswise and otherwise.
We should be in control of our local councils in those areas where we are/were the majority.

VICTORIES

But after the street battles that won us our victories of the past (and not just us, because let’s face it – Asian communities benefited from the blood we shed in the eighties - (not the two Asian people burned to death in Handsworth Post Office - LT) we rested on our laurels. Like ex-slaves, we indulged our new found freedoms far too long and partied until it was 1999. By then of course it was too late.

During the eighties and nineties more drugs were pumped into the black communities of Britain than ever before. I lived in and worked in Brixton at the time. Previously it had been all about the good sensi (or collie or lamb’s bread, as it used to be known). After the riots of 1981 and 1985, we began to see the emergence of hard drugs – heroin, speed, then cocaine, and then, of course, crack.

The drugs did their job, They subdued our people into submission. Those very same crack addicts that you see in ‘black’ neighbourhoods are the same guys who used to live on the frontline ready to protest at the injustices we suffered. Those injustices are still here, but if you ask the warriors of old to come out and demonstrate, they’ll fall prostrate, begging for one more hit.

You see, in winning the streets we really didn’t win anything. The streets belong to everybody, whatever your local gang might think. Real power and real wealth is all about who controls the means of production, the judiciary and executive.

The Nigerians of Peckham know this. They are the new Jamaicans. It remains to be seen whether they will be seduced into not buying the freehold of that corner of south east London that will forever be ‘Lagos’.

There's enough material here for an entire conference.

(cross-posted at Biased-BBC)