Tuesday, March 11, 2008 

Analysing throw away comments too deeply.

Via Pickled Politics, Martin O'Neill has some harsh words for the BBC 2 documentary, part of the "White" season, which dealt with Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood. Further discussion is on Crooked Timber, but this comment on O'Neill's post is simply too good to be true:

Why are so many decent british/english leaving every month, every year to places like France, america, and australia? I tell you why and its because of all the foreigners.

You could just laugh and leave it at that. After all, all of those nations have just as big, if not larger immigrant populations than Blighty, and those leaving to go and live in any of the major cities in those countries are unlikely to find life that different as it is to here. It's notable that he's missed out Spain, which has one of the largest British ex-pat populations, but has also been one of the main centres for immigration, far more so than we have been. That a good number of those who then go out and live in those countries do nothing whatsoever to integrate themselves, but still feel the need to pop up on UK newspaper websites decrying the immigration situation or the latest political correctness madness is also always amusing. There are of course exceptions to that rule: the Grauniad ran an article last week about British ex-pats running for office in rural France and horror of horrors, conversing in French while campaigning.

theone's point though isn't quite the non sequitur it looks at first glance however. You shouldn't perhaps read too much into a possibly throwaway remark, but the choice of Australia, France and the USA as examples rather than Spain as previously mentioned is indicative of countries which are still seen as overwhelmingly white, whether that's actually true or not. theone and those he's describing don't want to get away from immigrants, but rather from those that aren't white. As Sunny has himself argued about the white season, just as many working-class brown families face the exact same problems, because the issue is not one of race but class. The poll conducted for the BBC to coincide with the season was interesting not because the white working classes felt they were ignored, which they certainly are by political parties of all varieties which are obsessed with the middle-classes and swing voters to such an extent that they are destroying the political system from within through the madness of the end of ideology and the rise of dog-whistle policies, but because 46% of the ABC1 group also thought no one spoke for them. The most pampered group in modern history, for whom nothing is too good, and still nearly half of them believes that no one speaks for them. If it wasn't so tragic, it'd almost be as funny as theone's comments.

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3/11/2008 07:51:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, February 11, 2008 

The last word (hopefully) on Williams.

If you want a prime example of how the hyperbole over Rowan Williams' speech has not just infected the tabloids, but also those we're meant to rely on to accurately and astutely comment and report the day's events, here's Matthew d'Ancona, editor of the Spectator in his Sunday Torygraph column providing a glaringly obvious comparison:

Forty years after Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech, the Archbishop of Canterbury has delivered its liberal mirror image: let us call it "rivers of blather". The lecture that Dr Rowan Williams gave in London on Thursday night, and specifically his remarks on sharia law, showed that even the mildest-mannered intellectual can become a bulldog in the social china shop, spraying daft ideas around with a recklessness that disgraced his office.

The analogy is ludicrous because no one needed to distort or misinterpret Powell's speech - it was a disgrace then and it's just of much as a disgrace now. Powell talked of "piccaninnies", language which Boris Johnson thought was amusing to use not so long back, of the black man holding the whip over the white man, of a woman who wanted a rates reduction because she was the only remaining white person in a street of "blacks" and wouldn't put up immigrants which had previously boosted her earnings, of the " horror on the other side of the Atlantic", i.e., African-Americans being given the same rights as the white population. There was more, much more.

Rowan Williams, unlike Powell, who gave his speech to an audience of the Conservative Political Centre, which was never likely to disagree with him, gave his instead to a room full of lawyers, who one could imagine could and probably were picking numerous holes in it as he went along, if they weren't falling asleep under the torrent of his convoluted ramblings. Perhaps both shared a slight amount of naivete; Powell asked journalists the following morning whether he'd really caused such a furore, while Williams seems to have been depressed and aghast that his speech caused such a storm. Around the most inflammatory thing that Williams voiced was that he viewed some sort of conflict between state loyalty and religious loyalty as unavoidable unless elements of Sharia, were recognised. As it so happens, Williams doesn't really need to worry: as Alexander Goldberg explains on CiF, the Beth Din courts operate under the arbitration act, which allows for "foreign law" to take precedence over English law (there is no such thing as British law, as both politicians and newspapers have stated, as Scottish law is entirely separate) where two people can sign agreements subjecting themselves to the eventual binding ruling. This is what the Sharia courts also operate under.

The Sun's coverage of Williams' performance in front of the Synod is a prime example of how the press creates a situation and then only uses the information which is useful towards its already preordained stance. The unacceptable reality - that Williams was given a standing ovation as he entered the chamber and had to ask them to sit and stop applauding, with only one or two exceptions, something repeated once he had finished speaking - isn't so much as mentioned. Instead, the Sun describes his defence of his speech, where he said that he took responsibility for the "unclarity" of his remarks and acknowledged that they might have been expressed "clumsily", mentioning the reporting of his speech but not directly criticising the way it was distorted, as "desperate", and then despite the show of support given today, goes on to claim that "his flock" had turned against him yesterday. The main complaint of those interview by the Sun outside Kent cathedral seems to have been that he was considering Islam at all, especially seeing as this is a "Christian" country, and ought to be outside of his remit, rather than directly angry about his comments on Sharia.

Along with Justin and Anton Vowl, one of the most bizarre things about this whole tedious charade has been that atheists, in which I include myself, seem to have been among those who have most defended the Archbishop. It certainly hasn't been out of any sympathy towards religions or the religious, let alone their personally perverse systems of law which they adhere to over others that are fairer and more enlightened that I've defended him, but rather because of that other enlightenment value that some who've been attacking Williams have seem to have forgotten: that freedom of speech is and must be an absolute. To take it back to d'Ancona's spurious Powell equivocation, if a shadow secretary of state as he was, was now to make a similar, updated version of the Rivers of Blood speech, I'd be among the first to vigorously attack him for his message, but I wouldn't be calling for his resignation, just as I think I wouldn't if I'd be around in Powell's own day. Not only is it not for me to decide whether he should remain in his job because of his views, your personal views, unless they are in direct contradiction with that job itself, should never be a basis for someone losing it.

What is increasingly clear, especially from Williams' clarification in front of the Synod, is that he thinks of himself not just as the representative of the Church of England, but as someone who can also comment on issues affecting other religious issues. It's this, perhaps more than his actual views on them that is likely to trouble his own constituency in the long run, not to mention those in the other communities that would rather he'd keep his mouth shut. This is directly because the Church of England especially is in something approaching a crisis: its lack of relevance isn't only continuing to reverberate, it's fast accelerating. Williams might not admit to it, but he probably sees the rise in attendance in Catholic churches, mainly off the back of migration from eastern Europe, which continues to buck the general Western trend off godlessness, and also the increasing hubbub, if not power surrounding Islam, and wishes that he could have a bit of that. Why then shouldn't he attempt to articulate an issue which concerns some Muslims, but which doesn't have a leader powerful enough or visible enough to make the sort of impact that he could?

Apart from the general uncertainty and questioning about Muslims and Islam which has underlined the response to his lecture, the other thing has certainly been that which he most fears; that Britain, far from being the Christian country which those opposed to him espouse, is in fact a secular nation and increasingly becoming more so. We're not just objecting to Islamic religious law, we're objecting to the tyranny of any religious law. The biggest problem affecting Williams is that he's between a rock and a hard place; he's not liberal enough or agnostic enough for those who are opposed to religion generally, and he's not godly enough or hard enough on the queers for those of the evangelical or "traditional" bent who seem to increasingly make up the remaining brunt of those who practice rather than just think there might be a God. One suspects that the very least of his worries are the obscurantists on the Scum who would be laughed at for suggesting he was giving a victory to terrorism if it wasn't so serious.

Leaving aside the internal religious politics, the comment over the weekend which was most pertinent on Williams' argument was on the way Sharia views women inherently as inferior, giving their evidence only half of the weight to which it gives to men's. While I don't claim to know whether this is the same under all the different varying interpretations of Sharia, this is reason enough why it should never be given the same recognition under law as our common law is, as if the European Court of Human Rights ruling was not enough on its own, as Daniel Davies pointed out, for why it would never be allowed onto the statute books. The other side though is eloquently expressed by Ayesha Khan, who reported on Divorce: Sharia Style, who writes of the Muslim women who despite the inequity of the system are still determined to use it. Who are we to condemn them for doing so, which has largely been the undercurrent of the coverage since Thursday?

Williams was always going to survive this controversy, regardless of the best efforts of the most egregious in the Street of Shame to force otherwise. The question is whether he's been irrevocably damaged because of it, and again the answer seems to be negative. Regardless of his real intentions behind the speech, he was fully entitled to put across his message: he just happened, like many of us often are, to be wrong. River of blather or not, the very last thing he is is a modern-day Powell.

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2/11/2008 09:23:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, November 05, 2007 

Enoch Powell was right - and completely and utterly wrong.

If there's one thing we can be glad about when we talk about immigration and its effects, it's that we that none of our politicians are as rabid as some of those currently in office in Italy. Unlike here, Italy imposed no restrictions on Romanian or Bulgarian free movement when they joined the European Union at the beginning of the year, and like with the result when we were only one of three countries to not impose similar restrictions on the A8 countries in 2004, Romanians especially have moved to Italy in search of work. Armed with dubious figures which suggest that although they only make up 1% of the population, Romanians make up 5.6% of those charged with murder, it took the violent death of Giovanni Reggiani for the centre-left government of Romano Prodi to pass what can only be described as panic legislation which allows for the deportation of any other EU national judged to pose a "threat to public security." Vigilantes have since attacked Romanians and the post-fascists have called for mass repatriation.

From Italy we move to Halesowen and Rowley Regis, the constituency for which the Conservative Nigel Hastilow was until Sunday the prospective candidate for. His decision to resign over his article in Friday's Wolverhampton Express and Star which commented that "Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”, is hardly a one-off event. Every couple of years an MP, a councillor or a candidate gets exposed for holding less than salubrious views, and they either sit it out, resign, or are summarily sacked. Earlier this year we had Patrick Mercer, who shouldn't have had to resign or be sacked for his explanation of the reality of army life, but went anyway. Late last year there was the Conservative councillor who sent on a highly offensive and racist email about Pakistani immigrants. Prior to that there was Ann Winterton and her joke about the Chinese cockle pickers, and two years previously a joke about Pakistanis "being ten a penny." You could write a whole post purely on Tories and their "jokes."

Even the most naive person must realise however that mentioning Enoch Powell and his infamous speech is career suicide, yet Hastilow did it anyway while noting that he was marginalised afterwards. Rightly or wrongly, and you can argue that Powell was, as the apologists for Hastilow would also say, simply speaking for what many others are thinking and telling them, his whole political life has been reduced to just one simple phrase: rivers of blood. Hastilow himself in his actual article only mentions the rivers of blood in inverted commas, and the mention of Powell being right is not his own, but that of "most people" in the Black Country.

More than anything, his article in indicative for what it isn't: it isn't racist, nor is it even slightly original. It's the atypical rant which will appear every so often in any of the right-wing tabloids. He uses an example of a family that may or may not exist that in their own view have been forgotten about and ignored by the local authorities because the "immigrants" have taken all the accommodation. Powell himself used a couple of such examples in his speech, one of a man who said he wanted his family to move abroad because "in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" and appropriately enough, of a white elderly woman in Wolverhampton supposedly the only white person remaining on her street, who had "excreta pushed through her letterbox." These are the stock, possibly apocryphal tales which make up these "I'm not a racist but.." stories which enable the politician or writer to push an agenda which they're too frightened to come out with and say openly. Later he makes use of Asian Britons who've told him exactly the same, which is the latest example of the above. To be fair, there was an Asian man on Question Time last week who was of the same opinion, and it does for a second make you wonder whether they've forgotten the racism they must have undoubtedly suffered at some point in their lives, or their own struggle for acceptance which their parents underwent, but to pretend that anyone who has a skin colour other than white can't be racist is a self-deluding fantasy. Just because they've said it doesn't make it any less racist or wrong.

Hastilow continues: the nub of his argument is that there are far too many people, that our services can't cope, that we only need these migrants because our own indigenous potential workforce is all on benefits, all so predictable and also easy to disagree with. If anything, the current balance of people is about right, our services are coping admirably well, as the reports recently have shown, and the numbers of those on incapacity benefit are overwhelmingly those who lost their jobs in the 80s and haven't worked since, and aren't going to again. Society may be getting healthier, as he writes, when he perhaps ought to say we're living longer, but if the government's predictions are anything to go by, half of us might well be obese shortly. He claims the population is growing by almost half a million every year but he seems to have forgotten to deduct those emigrating from those migrating, which leaves a net increase of about 200,000. He asks whether we want 3 million more houses, which we'll need regardless of immigration or not, even though he's a member of the party that created the problem through the selling off of council stock that hasn't been replaced. He implies we'll need higher taxes to cope, when we what really need is better targeted funding to the places that need it.

Trevor Phillips last week praised David Cameron for helping to "deracialise" the whole issue of immigration, and Hastilow is equally vehement that it's not about race but numbers. Cameron does deserve a certain amount of credit for a calm, measured speech on immigration, but his policy of not actually coming up with a number for his magical cap is politically bankrupt. The only real reason why the debate has become "deracialised" is that the migration itself is now overwhelmingly deracialised. Those who have come here since the ascension of the eastern European countries to the EU in 2004 might speak a different language, but they sure look like "us" and have the same colour of skin as us. True, the tabloids have tried to whip up the occasional furore about the Polish, notably the Daily Mail (see FCC ad nauseam and here for the most recent most egregious attempt), but most of it has been half-hearted. There's a reason why the British National Party hasn't turned its fire entirely on the new wave of immigration from Europe and has instead concentrated on Muslims, and that's because they're overwhelmingly as Aryan as "we" are. If the migration was coming from either northern Africa or the Middle East, you can bet, "political correctness" or otherwise that the debate would most certainly not be as "deracialised" as it currently is.

Along comes then Hastilow's solution. Police our borders. Deport without debate "bogus asylum seekers". There's no such thing as a bogus asylum seeker, as the Press Complaints Commission set out 4 years ago in a recommendation to editors. There are only failed asylum seekers. Illegal immigrants get the same treatment. Abandon the "human rights" merry-go-round. Get rid of the 11,000 foreign criminals. Note how many of Hastilow's recommendations are the government's own, yet you can't suggest such things. It's all right though, as Hastilow is humane enough to care about "genuine" refugees who we should always allow in. We, not the immigrants themselves are being exploited, and we're a soft touch seen around the world. As a graduate of the university of reading Sun editorials, I can testify I've read the term "soft touch" dozens of times.

If anything, the whole article shows Hastilow's cowardice. He hides behind the granny of the family for saying that Enoch was right. He quotes the Asian Britons who tell him that too many immigrants now come to benefit purely from the welfare state. He instead mainly lambasts the Brits who can't be bothered to work or who can't work. No sir, he hasn't said anything offensive. The others can do that for him. It serves however to perpetuate the myths of political correctness and that you can't talk about immigration without being called a racist and lambasted. Never mind that almost the exact same article could be read in the pages of many papers in this country without anyone batting an eyelid, Hastilow has been silenced and freedom of speech is threatened. Those who fought the Nazis have been betrayed.

There is a debate to be had about immigration, and it does need to be decided on whether there is an optimum rate. The numbers currently coming though are not set in stone. The restrictions that have resulted in those from the A8 coming to either here, Ireland or Sweden might be lifted; circumstances back home will change, with the figures suggesting that the numbers might have already peaked. There's the small matter that shortly the boomers will be moving in retirement, putting pressure on the pensions schemes; unless we all intend to work far longer than our parents, it might well be immigrants that come to the rescue. While no one is suggesting completely cutting off the flow, the farming industry would undoubtedly collapse without migrant labour, as might the care industry that looks after the elderly we so casually toss aside. We might storing up problems for later, but for the moment the economy and the country are benefiting with only minor instances of pressure on services.

Powell in one sense was definitely right - immigration has irrevocably changed this country, but it's changed it for the better. Britain as a result is both more tolerant and pleasant because of it. It's not because of "political correctness" that we've reacted differently to say Italy; it's because of our personal experience of immigration and the challenges that it brings. I saw the comedian Stewart Lee recently, and in a part of his routine about political correctness and why he thought it was a good thing, he mentioned that when he was at school there was one Asian child in his class, and the teacher always referred to him, every single time, as the "black spot". It's unimaginable and shocking today because of how we've been changed. Powell was completely and utterly wrong because the change has come about, not with the black man gaining the upper hand, far from it, but without the rivers of blood he predicted. There have been riots, but mercifully few, and with little loss of actual life. People do regularly say "Enoch Powell was right", I've even heard my father saying it and later rebuked him for it. Like Powell, they were wrong then and they're still wrong now. Hastilow shouldn't have been made to resign or to apologise - he should still stand and see where his article gets him. I have more faith that the people Halesowen and Rowley Regis would make the right decision than I do in those that have supposedly been contacting him from around the world to back him up.

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11/05/2007 10:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

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