Gary Younge | ukwatch.net

It's no surprise that the BNP's rise and New Labour's demise are linked

JamieSW — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:19:57 +0000

On Wednesday evening around 7pm, the Reverend Roger Gayler, vicar of St Marks parish, went to answer a knock on the door. It was the night before the Chadwell Heath byelection for Barking and Dagenham council in Greater London, and Gayler had recently written an open letter to his flock.

“I rarely enter the party political arena and do so very reluctantly, but as a matter of Christian principle I feel this time I must,” he wrote. “The [British National party] would divide our community, spread fear through lies, and reduce services to those in our community who most need them (they proposed huge cuts in services for the elderly and young people in their budget). They preach the politics of hate.”

The man at the door was Robert Bailey, BNP leader on the council. He was clearly agitated. “He asked me whether I’d written it,” recalls Gayler. “I said ‘yes’.”

“This goes against the democratic process,” said Bailey.

“It’s all part of the democratic process,” replied Gayler.

“You’re just a fascist,” said Bailey, and then scrumpled the letter and threw it at the vicar.

“There was no shouting or screaming but it was obviously a visit from a very rattled person,” says Gayler.

The next evening, in Dagenham’s council chamber, a multiracial team of council workers tallied the votes. The BNP had 12 seats on the council and was hoping this would be their 13th. In the end, a seat vacated by Labour was won by the Tories by a comfortable margin. Nothing strange there. The BNP candidate came third with 25% of the vote in a ward the party had never contested before. Sadly, there seemed to be nothing strange there either.

Terry Justice, the Tory victor, said he looked forward to working with all his fellow councillors. When I asked Margaret Mullane, the Labour candidate, what she made of the size of the BNP vote, she said: “You’ll have to ask the BNP about that really.” Leaving Dagenham civic centre, with the clock nudging closer to midnight, I felt I was heading back to the 30s.

Bailey is not the only one who should be feeling rattled. True, under the circumstances, the fact that they didn’t win could be regarded as a victory. But those circumstances are dire.

The BNP’s advances have been spotty – still limited to particular towns and regions. But over the last decade those spots have become larger and more widespread. Back in 1993, its gain of a single council seat in London’s Tower Hamlets produced a brief, but intense, moment of national introspection. Today it has more than 50 councillors in around 20 councils plus a member of the London assembly. By increments it has become an accepted, if contested, fact of British municipal life.

For all the talk of Islamo-fascism – that desperately belligerent phrase that some hurl about in the hope that it may one day land on a coherent meaning – plain old-fashioned fascism is the force truly making gains. Elsewhere in Europe, where the far right runs councils and holds cabinet seats, things are far worse. In Italy, the state recently started fingerprinting Gypsies, along with a promise to take Gypsy children not attending school into custody. In Switzerland, the far right is in government. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right, nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10% of the vote. In Norway, it is more than twice that; in Switzerland, the figure it is almost three times as much.

If our Enlightenment values really are under threat, then the primary challenge seems to be domestic – and far more familiar and entrenched than some would have us believe. This is not a handful of young, nihilist men with backpacks – it is marginalised communities with ballot papers.

None of this denies or excuses the rise in jihadism. Indeed, it is only possible to make an effective stand against either by recognising the potency of both. The “tolerant, liberal” society that immigrants – particularly Muslims – are being told to join has long been eroding. While multiculturalism has been under assault, nostalgic visions of a mythological monoculture have been given a new lease of life.

Just as there is more to racism in Britain than the BNP, the BNP’s rise tells us more about Britain than just racism. It is a canary in the mine – an early warning system signalling the complacency of our political culture in which our political class has been complicit. Trapped in a hopeless spiral of negativity, people will vote against anything – immigration, the Tories, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Scottish nationalism, Gordon Brown or Europe, to name a few. But it seems a long time since large numbers of people voted for anything.

So the fact that the BNP has performed best in Labour strongholds should come as no surprise. Its rise and New Labour’s demise are linked. The government is failing even on its own modest terms. Child poverty and pensioner poverty are up. Economic inequality is now greater than under the Tories. Inflation is rising, house prices falling, and last week workers were again asked to tighten their belts. Never mind no return to boom and bust – many feel like they are about to crash and burn. People are desperate.

There is nothing inevitable about this shift from despondency to demagoguery. Black and Asian people are overrepresented among the poor and vulnerable, and they aren’t voting for the BNP. Nor are the overwhelming majority of white working-class people. Nonetheless, the trend has always been likely and logical. A party that has its historical roots and electoral base in the working class and then fails to advance the interests of that class will engender cynicism. New Labour’s electoral project is based in no small measure on the calculation that the poor have nowhere else to go. A small but determined minority have retreated into their laagers in search of solutions and solace.

However, New Labour’s decision to follow them there made no sense, either morally or strategically. Following the strong showing of the BNP in Burnley, Anthony Giddens, the architect of the third way, spoke of being “tough on immigration and tough on the causes of hostility to immigrants”. Tony Blair prioritised “crime and social behaviour” and “immigration and asylum”.

But these populist responses hold no sustainable answers to the particular and urgent material needs of the white working class. Incarcerating asylum seekers or bashing the niqab built no houses, created no jobs and educated no children. That does not, in itself, necessarily make them wrong – but as a response to the concerns of Labour’s base they were worse than useless. New Labour’s legislative shortcomings made a BNP revival possible; the government’s rhetorical excesses made it electorally palatable.

Given its huge majority, Labour could have made the case against racism and xenophobia. But rather than stand on principle, it has preferred to pander. Having ducked the major challenges, it has left it to the likes of Rev Roger Gayler to literally face the consequences of the failure head on.

In Europe, Where's the Hate?

JamieSW — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:58:48 +0000

Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d’Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet’s small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor’s approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.

In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: “No Mosque,” “Christian Hill” and “Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!”

Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present. It is probably not the dynamic you have heard most about. The most popular one making the rounds this side of the Atlantic involves hordes of Muslims, rabid with anti-Semitic and misogynistic views, running amok as they bomb, bully and outbreed their clueless liberal hosts in a bid to build a caliphate.

“Do you have a child back in England?” an elderly Los Angelena asked a British reporter on a recent National Review cruise.

“No,” he said.

“You’d better start,” she replied. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”

Nor is it by any means the only dynamic. There are a handful of nihilistic young Muslims keen to bomb and destroy and a far larger number sufficiently disaffected that they are prepared to riot. There are also many Europeans keen to see equality and meaningful integration, defending civil liberties and opposing wars against predominantly Muslim lands.

But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”—that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning—but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.

For fascism—and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations—has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe. Its advocates not only run in elections but win them. They control local councils and sit in parliaments. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10 percent of the vote. In Norway it is 22 percent; in Switzerland, 29 percent. In Italy and Austria they have been in government; in Switzerland, where the anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party is the largest party, they still are.

This is not new. From Austria to Antwerp, Italy to France, fascists have been performing well at the polls for more than a decade. Nor are they shy about their bigotry. France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen has described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”; Austria’s Jörg Haider once thanked a group of Austrian World War II veterans, including former SS officers, for “stick[ing] to their convictions despite the greatest opposition.” But the attacks of 9/11, the bombings in Spain and Britain and the riots in France gave the hard right new traction. The polarizing effects of terrorism facilitated the journey of hard-right agendas from the margins to the mainstream. Islamophobia became de rigueur. Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that “we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples.”

In September 2006, British novelist Martin Amis told the Times of London: “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan…. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Far from being the principal purveyors of racial animus in Europe, Muslims are its principal targets. Between 2000 and 2005 officially reported racist violence rose 71 percent in Denmark, 34 percent in France and 21 percent in Ireland. With few governments collecting data on racial crime victims, it has been left to NGOs to record the sharp rise in attacks on Muslims, those believed to be Muslims and Muslim targets.

None of this means anti-Semitism and jihadism don’t exist among Muslim communities in Europe. But it does provide a context for both. Muslims are a relatively tiny percentage of European citizens—there is a higher proportion of Asians in Utah than Muslims in Italy—and are overwhelmingly concentrated among the poor. More than 40 percent of Bangladeshi men in Britain under the age of 25 are unemployed. All of this excuses nothing but explains a great deal. According to a Pew Research Center survey, the principal concerns of Muslims in France, Germany and Spain are unemployment and Islamic extremism. Integrating into a society that won’t employ you, educate you or house you adequately is no easy feat. Participating in a political culture that scapegoats you is also tough. Attacked as Muslims at home and abroad, they defend themselves as Muslims. Every respected report in Britain has shown a direct link between the war in Iraq and recruitment to Islamist movements. And so the symbiosis of Islamophobes and Islamists is complete, with each thriving on polarization and prejudice: picking at scabs that might have healed, until the blood runs freely.

The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim; they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb—it is simply suffering from one of its oldest viruses harbored among its most established ethnic populations.

Honest About Our Past

jo — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:50:29 +0000

There is a strange kind of liberation that comes with knowing that your days in office are literally numbered. Journalists spend a decade trying to finish you off and then, just when it looks as if they might be successful, they feed you to the historians.

So in this year when we commemorate the 200th anniversary of parliament passing the bill to end trading in enslaved Africans using British ships, I’ve come to Cardiff to make history. In this beautiful city, with one of the oldest black communities in Britain, which was the site of one of the country’s first race riots, and where abolitionists and slave traders both thrived, I have come to apologise for our role in the slave trade.

This is not a personal apology but a political one. It has nothing to do with individual guilt and everything to do with collective responsibility. I wasn’t personally involved in the slave trade – none of us were. But all of us – British, African, American, black, white and Indian – live with its legacy. I apologise for our nation and our parliament. I offer the apology unreservedly and unequivocally. I utter it with no lawyerly caveats or tepid reservation. I am sorry. I say it not to pander to any particular community but because unless we can distinguish right from wrong in the past, there is little hope of us righting wrongs in the present. Slavery was wrong. Apologising for the role we played in it is right.

The apology is important. I hope it resolves any suggestion of moral indifference to our involvement in the traffic of human beings that so economically enriched and ethically impoverished this country. But, in a way, apologising is the easy part. Apologies are only meaningful if you vow to change the behaviour that made them necessary in the first place. And that is what I want to concentrate on today. New Labour was elected on a modernising agenda. We don’t live in the past. But we do learn from it. And we stand at a particular moment in our national history when it behoves us to reflect on what we have been, so we might imagine what we might yet become.

This anniversary reveals two crucial truths about us as a country that can help us on our way. First, like all nations and peoples, we have done things in which we can take no pride. There is a peculiar taboo on this point that must be broken for all our sakes. So let’s turn our backs on political correctness and deliver some hard truths. Our history is littered with appalling episodes that we must acknowledge, of which we should be ashamed, and for which we must then take responsibility. Slavery and colonialism did not just lead to the exploitation, humiliation, maiming and murder of millions. The intolerance, bigotry and indifference to human suffering they entailed crippled us, morally, as a people.

Second, in passing that bill 200 years ago, parliament showed that as a people we have achieved many things of which we can rightly be proud. Our history bears witness to moments when ordinary working people have risen above narrow-minded prejudice, turned their backs on hate-mongers and fought for equality and human rights; moments at which we’ve taken a long hard look at our differences and decided that we are all more alike than we are unalike. Moments when we fought not just on the beaches and in the fields, but on the estates, in workplaces and local councils, to preserve what is great about this country and eradicate what is rotten.

For those great things – free speech, democracy, equality and tolerance – aren’t essentially British. They are essentially human. There is nowhere in the world where you cannot find people fighting for them; and there is nowhere in the world, including Britain, where they are not under constant attack.

Indeed, often in our history our parliament, and occasionally our people, have been on the wrong side of that struggle. But always there have been brave men and women, at times all too few, prepared to keep the flame of justice and humanism burning so that others may some day carry the torch. It is them we must thank for the fact that we have one of the most racially integrated nations on the planet, where for the most part people from all over the world coexist but rarely collide. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people fought for it.

At times it has been a tough battle. It would be strange if it hadn’t. We have had periods of great pain and turbulence when black, white and brown have felt excluded and turned, not to solving the problems, but on each other. There are still too many black men and women in prison and not enough in boardrooms; there are still too many Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in poor housing and not enough in the Commons; there are still too many white boys roaming the streets and not enough revising for their GCSEs.

As a government we cannot change what’s in people’s hearts. But, as we showed 200 years ago, we can change what is in our laws. In so doing, we can provide people with hope and play a role in improving their lives. So we must be tough on bigotry but also tough on the causes of bigotry. We have to face the likes of the British National party head-on and tell them that their racism has no place in this country. But we must also be aware of why a growing number follow them. Poor housing, poor education, low prospects, high unemployment, desperation, ignorance and fear all fertilise the soil on which fascism grows.

Similarly, we have to face down the jihadists and their hateful campaign of terror. They advance no cause with which we will have any truck. Their anti-semitic, homophobic, anti-woman, anti-democratic, anti-western agenda is an abomination. But once again we must also be aware of why a growing number follow them.

All inquiry points to the fact that the war in Iraq has contributed significantly to this disaffection, and for that I take my share of responsibility. There will be some people I will never convince about why I thought it was necessary to support the US in this venture. But I would like to think there is at least one thing on which all right-minded people can agree: that you don’t save civilians in Iraq by bombing civilians in London.

So let’s use this anniversary to take a long hard look in the mirror at both the best and the worst not just of what we have done, but what we can do. We have a long way to go. There are still too many black and Asian people who flinch at the national anthem and the union flag even though they were born here. There are still too many white people who flinch at the prospect of a black or Asian neighbour.

But we have come a long way. Take a look at your CD racks, bookshelves and sports teams; look at your local hospital, restaurants and local transport. Look at your parliament, television and theatre. Compare it not to 200 years ago but even to 20 years ago, and see how tightly every aspect of our lives are interdependent and interwoven.

My apology does not open old wounds, it helps lay the groundwork for a new beginning. Only once we are honest about our past can we be truly hopeful about our future.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Immigration Profiling

Alex Doherty — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:16:20 +0000

One morning several years ago, an MP’s secretary agreed to meet me off a train in rural Wales and take me to her boss for an interview. The train arrived on time and about 15 people got off, leaving just me standing there. A middle-aged woman remained looking straight through me for what seemed like an age before it occurred to her that the black man with whom she was sharing the platform might just be the Guardian journalist she was supposed to be meeting. She said she was expecting someone taller.

I was reminded of that incident last August as I crossed into the US from the Mexican border town of Palomas. I was travelling with a photographer – a white Mexican with dual Spanish citizenship who, unlike me, did not have a visa to work as a journalist in the US. I thought there would be a problem. I didn’t realise the problem would be me.

The border guard arranged for dogs to sniff my belongings and other guards to search my hire car, while she checked out my visa, asked me where I was born so many times I could barely remember, and made me explain every stamp in my passport. Meanwhile the visaless photographer had been waved through. Finally, when she had run out of fingers to fingerprint, she had to concede the possibility that I might actually be the foreign correspondent I claimed to be. Maybe she thought I should be taller.

The Home Office report, Exploring the Decision-Making of Immigration Officers, published last week, provides further evidence of what most non-white travellers have long known to be true. That the practice of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion persists at borders around the world. Compared to all the strip-searching, deportations and interrogations that go on, I have got off lightly. My granny was once questioned for more than three hours after arriving from Barbados. They wanted to know, among other things, whether she was coming to work. “Do you cut cane here too?” she asked.

These abuses are not systematic. According to the report, British immigration officers say they base their decisions on “instinct” or “intuition” about people who “look the part”. On further inspection, these sixth senses turn out to be total nonsense – a grab-bag of “received wisdom” constructed from stereotypes that are anything but wise. “American ladies who’ve got loads of jewellery on … their hair is perfect … their makeup is perfect and their clothes are really nice,” apparently get their approval. Young women in “white stilletos and short skirts”, however, could be prostitutes.

But the abuses are systemic. For what looks like an individual’s hunch is little more than the accumulated weight of assumption, presumption and prejudice, entrenched by global economics and sustained by local politics. Capital, we are told, must flow freely around the world to ensure international prosperity. The trouble is, this prosperity remains elusive to many in a world where about half the people live on less than $2 a day and the rules of international trade are weighted against the poor. Facing hunger and destitution, the poor move in search of work. But when they seek to gain access to the wealthiest countries – the very ones which created the rules that keep them poor – the doors are closed. Politicians desperate to galvanise popular support at home argue not for correcting the global inequalities in wealth but instead for stiffer immigration laws to keep the poor out. Since most, but by no means all, of these impoverished people are not white, racism almost inevitably informs and infects these immigration laws and the debate that surrounds them.

By the time it gets to the gatekeepers, the damage has largely been done. What immigration officers describe as instinct is, in truth, little more than playing the odds. “We’re making decisions based on … a balance of probability,” said one immigration officer. In other words, they correctly intuit that there is a greater likelihood that non-white travellers will be poorer than white travellers and so stop them more often.

So non-white travellers fall foul not of the law of the land but the law of probabilities. The result is a vastly disproportionate number of black and Asian travellers who are stopped for questioning because on some level they “do not look the part”. Non-white South Africans are 10 times more likely to be subjected to further questioning and non-white Canadians nine times more likely than their white countrymen.

The authors of the report insist that this has nothing to do with racism, insisting instead that socioeconomic factors play a key role. In other words, these people weren’t more likely to be stopped because they were black but because they were poor and therefore more likely to be seeking work or drawing on public funds.

There are two main problems with this conclusion. First, it isn’t true. Not only do the researchers provide no evidence for their conclusion. But the evidence they do provide suggests the contrary. When the figures were adjusted to take occupation into account, the discrepancy widened dramatically for all but the Americans. Non-white South Africans became 18 times more likely to be stopped and non-white Canadians 13.5 times. Moreover, when translated into sterling, the mean income of a black Canadian is almost double that of a white South African. Yet a black Canadian is four times more likely to be stopped than a white South African. Their efforts to understand race and class separately in this manner effectively lead to a complete misunderstanding of both.

Second, even if it were true, it is still wrong. For if the barriers to entry into the west are racist in practice, they are avowedly and unashamedly classist in intent. “For some immigration officers, credibility is essentially a matter of economics,” states the report. In this particular respect, the officers are really just doing their job: actively excluding poor people who it seems no longer have the right to travel around the west with dignity and without suspicion.

The basic right to the freedom of movement was championed as one of the central criticisms of the eastern bloc. But as soon as the wall came down we built another huge one to replace it. True, in Europe we are gradually and grudgingly expanding its perimeters; but most of the world remains on the other side of it – and the wall is getting higher. Politics once kept people in; now economics keeps them out.

For the wealthy, however, it is a different matter. The report claimed that immigration officers have learned to “no longer … ask a well-travelled American businessman how much money he has brought with him or for details of his bank balance”. So the man most likely to steal your pension walks through without a word, while the one most likely to flip your burger or clean your house hugs the bottom of trains because legitimate means of entry are barred to them. So much for global citizenship.

So long as there are nation states there will be borders and immigration laws to regulate them. The least we can do is drop the pretence that these laws are fair. They are not designed to discriminate between people, but against them.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Endgame in Iraq

Tim Holmes — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:36:38 +0000

‘In the endgame,” said one of the world’s best-ever chess players, José Raúl Capablanca, “don’t think in terms of moves but in terms of plans.” The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower. Whatever mandate the occupiers may have once had from their own electorates – in Britain it was none, in the US it was precarious – has now eroded. They can no longer conduct this war as they have been doing.

Simultaneously, the Iraqis are no longer able to live under occupation as they have been doing. According to a UN report released last week, 3,709 Iraqi civilians died in October – the highest number since the invasion began. And the cycle of religious and ethnic violence has escalated over the past week.

The living flee. Every day up to 2,000 Iraqis go to Syria and another 1,000 to Jordan, according to the UN’s high commissioner for refugees. Since the bombing of Samarra’s Shia shrine in February more than 1,000 Iraqis a day have been internally displaced, a recent report by the UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration found last month.

Those in the west who fear that withdrawal will lead to civil war are too late – it is already here. Those who fear that pulling out will make matters worse have to ask themselves: how much worse can it get? Since yesterday American troops have been in Iraq longer than they were in the second world war. When the people you have “liberated” by force are no longer keen on the “freedom” you have in store for them, it is time to go.

Any individual moves announced from now on – summits, reports, benchmarks, speeches – will be ignored unless they help to provide the basis for the plan towards withdrawal. Occupation got us here; it cannot get us out. Neither Tony Blair nor George Bush is in control of events any longer. Both domestically and internationally, events are controlling them. So long as they remain in office they can determine the moves; but they have neither the power nor the credibility to shape what happens next.

So the crucial issue is no longer whether the troops leave in defeat and leave the country in disarray – they will – but the timing of their departure and the political rationale that underpins it.

For those who lied their way into this war are now trying to lie their way out of it. Franco-German diplomatic obstruction, Arab indifference, media bias, UN weakness, Syrian and Iranian meddling, women in niqabs and old men with placards – all have been or surely will be blamed for the coalition’s defeat. As one American columnist pointed out last week, we wait for Bush and Blair to conduct an interview with Fox News entitled If We Did It, in which they spell out how they would have bungled this war if, indeed, they had done so.

So, just as Britain allegedly invaded for the good of the Iraqis, the timing of their departure will be conducted with them in mind. The fact that – according to the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett – it will coincide with Blair leaving office in spring is entirely fortuitous.

More insidious is the manner in which the Democrats, who are about to take over the US Congress, have framed their arguments for withdrawal. Last Saturday the newly elected House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, suggested that the Americans would pull out because the Iraqis were too disorganised and self-obsessed. “In the days ahead, the Iraqis must make the tough decisions and accept responsibility for their future,” he said. “And the Iraqis must know: our commitment, while great, is not unending.”

It is absurd to suggest that the Iraqis – who have been invaded, whose country is currently occupied, who have had their police and army disbanded and their entire civil service fired – could possibly be in a position to take responsibility for their future and are simply not doing so.

For a start, it implies that the occupation is a potential solution when it is in fact the problem. This seems to be one of the few things on which Sunni and Shia leaders agree. “The roots of our problems lie in the mistakes the Americans committed right from the beginning of their occupation,” Sheik Ali Merza, a Shia cleric in Najaf and a leader of the Islamic Dawa party, told the Los Angeles Times last week.

“Since the beginning, the US occupation drove Iraq from bad to worse,” said Harith al-Dhari, the nation’s most prominent Sunni cleric, after he fled to Egypt this month facing charges of supporting terrorism.

Also, it leaves intact the bogus premise that the invasion was an attempt at liberation that has failed because some squabbling ingrates, incapable of working in their own interests, could not grasp the basic tenets of western democracy. In short, it makes the victims responsible for the crime.

Withdrawal, when it happens, will be welcome. But its nature and the rationale given for it are not simply issues of political point-scoring. They will lay the groundwork for what comes next for two main reasons.

First, because, while withdrawal is a prerequisite for any lasting improvement in Iraq, it will not by itself solve the nation’s considerable problems.

Iraq has suffered decades of colonial rule, 30 years of dictatorship and three years of military occupation. Most recently, it has been trashed by a foreign invader. The troops must go. But the west has to leave enough resources behind to pay for what it broke. For that to happen, the anti-war movement in the west must shift the focus of our arguments to the terms of withdrawal while explaining why this invasion failed and our responsibilities to the Iraqi people that arise as a result of that failure.

If we don’t, we risk seeing Bono striding across airport tarmac 10 years hence with political leaders who demand good governance and democratic norms in the Gulf, as though Iraq got here by its own reckless psychosis. Eviscerated of history, context and responsibility, it will stand somewhere between basket case and charity case: like Africa, it will be misunderstood as a sign not of our culpability but of our superiority.

Second, because unless we understand what happened in Iraq we are doomed to continue repeating these mistakes elsewhere. Ten days ago, during a visit to Hanoi, Bush was asked whether Vietnam offered any lessons. He said: “We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while … We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

In other words, the problem with Vietnam was not that the US invaded a sovereign country, bombed it to shreds, committed innumerable atrocities, murdered more than 500,000 Vietnamese – more than half of whom were civilians – and lost about 58,000 American servicemen. The problem with Vietnam was that they lost. And the reason they lost was not because they could neither sustain domestic support nor muster sufficient local support for their invasion, nor that their military was ill equipped for guerrilla warfare. They lost because it takes a while to complete such a tricky job, and the American public got bored.

“You learn more from a game you lose than a game you win,” argued the chess great Capablanca. True, but only if you heed the lessons and then act on them.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

No Honest Conversation

Tim Holmes — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 18:09:15 +0000

On Wednesday September 20 Corporal Donald Payne became the first Briton to admit to a war crime. Payne, 35, is accused of repeatedly banging the head of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi hotel worker, against a wall and floor until Mousa died – an accusation he denies. Payne called his Iraqi prisoners in the jail in Basra “the choir”, because he liked to invite friends to hear them shriek with the pain he inflicted. “Corporal Payne enjoyed conducting what he called the choir,” Julian Bevan QC told the court martial, which is taking place at Bulford Camp, in Wiltshire, and is expected to last for 16 weeks. “It was all done very openly.”

The next day the home secretary, John Reid, went to Leyton, in east London, and told a room full of Muslims how to raise their kids so they won’t grow up hateful. “Look for the telltale signs now and talk to them before their hatred grows and you risk losing them for ever,” he told them.

The heckler in his midst simply provided Reid with proof of his moral righteousness. “This is Britain,” Reid told the Labour party conference last week. “We will go where we please, we will discuss what we like, and we will never be browbeaten by bullies. That’s what it means to be British.”

Reid and Payne are two sides of the same coin. The bully of Basra exercises his right to demean and degrade wherever he pleases – the longstanding hallmarks of British colonialism. The hooligan from the Home Office vaunts the fair play, decency and social liberalism that ostensibly underpin core British values – a longstanding feature of Britain’s self-delusion. Payne could have done with some parenting lessons of his own. Instead he was given a uniform and a gun. The arrogance we imbibe and the atrocities we export do not just coexist – they are codependent. That’s also what it means to be British.

In Reid we find these qualities embodied in one man. Before he was the home secretary he was the defence secretary. He is set to have an impact on Britain’s racial terrain analogous to the one he has had on the killing fields of Iraq: making a fragile situation worse.

Reid is not alone in this. Last month Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, called for a “new and honest debate” about race in this country. This should not be mistaken for the “honest dialogue” Peter Hain wanted to launch in 2002 or the “rigorously honest” discussion David Blunkett sought to initiate in 2004. Quite what kind of deceitful debate they were engaged in back then and, given their huge parliamentary majority, what prevented their candour is not obvious. However, each followed a familiar pattern; promising blunt truths, but pandering to soft bigotry.

Kelly was no different. She insisted that it is “not racist” to voice concerns about immigration and asylum – a statement as true as it is fatuous since it depends on what those concerns are and what argument you’re making. “We must not be censored by political correctness,” she continued. “And we can’t tiptoe around the issues.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking? This was precisely the line taken by Michael Howard, the then Tory leader, before the last election. Far from being censored, the tabloids have been serving this tripe up as a staple for the past decade and New Labour has been swallowing it whole and then throwing it up whenever it gets nervous.

Any candid discussion of race, immigration and asylum that was not racist would not just acknowledge fear and prejudice but challenge them both. Since ministers are not able to do that about ethnic minorities, maybe they should start off with a subject with which they are more familiar. Let’s have an open and honest discussion about white people.

Let’s start by talking about how they don’t want to integrate. The stubborn rump of around 10% of whites who, according to a 2002 Mori poll, are hostile to racial equality and antagonistic to the very existence of non-white people in this country. Given a percentage point either way, that is the consistent figure who believe that to be truly British you must be white and who do not believe it is important to respect the rights of minority groups.

Let’s discuss their inability to choose moderate leaders and the propensity of the leaders they do choose to murder innocent civilians abroad by their thousands. Let’s analyse their vulnerability to extremists such as the British National party, not to mention elsewhere in Europe, where fascism is once again a mainstream ideology.

Let’s talk about the religious intolerance that rages in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and can be found in the highest levels of the state, where only Protestants can marry into royalty. And let’s not forget the terrorists white people have been rearing at home for years, whether they are bombing Brick Lane, parliament or shopping centres in Manchester, and the no-go areas in housing estates, football terraces and boardrooms.

Only then perhaps will it become sufficiently apparent for those with insufficient imagination just how crude and crass the framing of the debate about Muslims has been. Any group of people will rightly bristle at the demand to answer collectively for the acts of individuals with whom they share an identity but over whom they have no control.

The tolerant, secular, liberal society into which Muslims are being asked to integrate lies somewhere between mythology and a work in progress and, the responsibility for transforming it into a lived reality lies with all of us. When it comes to poor whites lured by organised racism, Labour makes allowances.

‘It is the poorest whites who feel the greatest anger because there is no way out for them,” said Margaret Hodge about some of her constituents in Barking earlier this year. “The Labour party hasn’t talked to these people. Part of the reason they switch to the BNP is they feel no one else is listening to them.” When it comes to Muslims lured by fundamentalism, they make threats: but no one is listening to them either.

We should not be in denial that some young Muslims have become attracted to extremism and fundamentalism in recent years, but nor should we be in denial about why that should be. Muslims did not invent terrorism, nor did they introduce it to this country. Indeed, so long as Britain has occupied foreign lands, it has been vulnerable to sporadic acts of violence on its own soil.

Which brings us back to Payne, Reid and Kelly. For there is no honest conversation you can have about the strained racial fabric of this country at present without talking about the war. Once branded leftwing heresy, this truism is now intelligence-service orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been “a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world”, according to a leaked document allegedly written by a British MI6 officer attached to the Ministry of Defence; and a “cause celebre for jihadists”, in the words of the US National Intelligence Estimate.

The war didn’t invent fundamentalism; nor did it introduce it into Britain. But it has clearly exacerbated it. So long as the likes of Corporal Payne can conduct their torture choirs abroad, our racial landscape will be scarred; so long as the likes of Reid are preaching to the racist choir at home, it will never heal.

Trusting Leaders

Alex Doherty — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 14:18:01 +0000

The day after Colin Powell did his show-and-tell before the United Nations security council in an attempt to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in February 2003, the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote a column entitled “I’m persuaded”. Describing how Vietnam “came close to making me [a pacifist]”, McGrory conceded that “nobody I know was for the war”. But something about Powell’s performance made her reconsider: “I don’t know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell’s ‘J’accuse’ speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.”

Two and a half years later Powell referred to the episode as “a painful blot” on his record – a pack of lies and half truths that has led to an ever-increasing mound of corpses.

The power of both illusion and delusion should never be underestimated. The compulsion to believe in something we need and want to be true, rather than see reality for what it is, can at times be astounding.

Remember those eyewitness accounts of the Brazilian student Jean Charles de Menezes before he was shot dead on the underground? Not all of them were made up by the police, although they did nothing to deny them. Mark Whitby, a plumber from Brixton, thought he saw a Pakistani terrorist being chased and gunned down by plain-clothes policemen. Less than a month later Mr Whitby told the Daily Telegraph “he now believes that what he actually saw was the surveillance officer being thrown out of the way” as Mr Menezes was being killed.

Anthony Larkin, who was on the train, said he saw “this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out”. The Pakistani in the puffa jacket who vaulted the barriers, it transpired, was a Brazilian in a light denim jacket who picked up a free paper and used his Oyster card.

I am not talking here about lying. The potency of downright fabrication is self-evident. What is truly insidious is the propensity of people to arrange an array of possibles, probables, maybes and might-bes, and construct from them a reality that is both definite and wrong.

The power of suggestion, assumption and presumption is everything. The day before Menezes was shot, London saw an attempt to launch a second terrorist attack in two weeks. What Whitby and Larkin saw had been refracted through a prism of fear and stereotypes, and emerged completely distorted. The price was right; the market was ripe; people bought into it.

The war in Iraq has revealed just how truly bullish and persistent this market in bad ideas based on flawed preconceptions can be. Bad ideas helped take us into the war; and unless we examine what they were and why some managed to believe them, they will prevent us from getting out.

In such a market there will always be sellers aplenty. Someone, somewhere, will forever be peddling war, bigotry, conspiracy, profiling, persecution and plunder. It is only when the buyers come forward in large numbers that we really have to worry. For at critical moments people do not just consume these bad ideas; they invest heavily in them too. So when reality refuses to match up to the idea, they do not change their ideas; they change reality.

There were of course lies; huge whoppers served up on both sides of the Atlantic. On February 23 2003 Tony Blair told the Commons that the government was giving Saddam “one further final chance to disarm voluntarily” through the United Nations. Three weeks earlier President George Bush told him the war was going ahead regardless of what the UN decided. Blair replied that he was “solidly” behind him.

This is of course disgraceful, not least because those who lied have never accepted responsibility for their actions. But it was not a surprise. The case was always flimsy and those who made it were never trustworthy. What is shocking is the number of people who not only bought it but wore it and are still trying to sell it on.

Last October the former Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said: “I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full measure of the Bush administration’s duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they have abused so badly. I know I would not.”

If Kerry did not have the full measure of Bush’s duplicitous and incompetent nature by that stage then he is a poor judge of character. The overwhelming majority of people in the rest of the world – who had far less access to information than he did – managed to see the war for what it was. But then they weren’t going to run for president.

In November the former Powell aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson told the Today programme: “You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder … was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I’m beginning to have my concerns.” Go figure. Shouldn’t the speculation begin before the bombs drop rather than after?

Everybody has the right to change their mind and make mistakes. The growing number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who believe it was wrong to go to war is heartening. But since the war has already been going for almost three years these regrets are only of any use, beyond personal expiation, if they help to correct the consequences of the original sin.

These particular turnarounds fail on two fronts. First, they expose the anti-war case to the charge of opportunism. People such as Kerry backed the war not on principle but because it was expedient to do so. They oppose it today for the same reason.

Second, there is little point in claiming you were tricked unless you address what made you so gullible in the first place. The basic idea that the US has a historic duty to bring progress, democracy and enlightenment at the barrel of a gun seems about as firmly ingrained in the American mindset as its record of doing the opposite in Central and South America and south-east Asia is in American history. Nothing that has happened in Iraq seems to have shifted that perception in the US. A significant minority were against the war from the start. For the rest, the trouble with the war is not that they invaded a sovereign country on a false pretext and killed hundreds of thousands. It’s that they’re not winning.

“We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t,” says Colonel Wilkerson. “We’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave.” Kerry’s position is similar. A Pew research survey in December showed that 48% of Americans believe that invading Iraq was wrong. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week revealed that 57% of Americans support military intervention if Iran builds itself a nuclear capability.

With each exposé of torture, subjugation, blunder and plunder you keep hearing that Americans have lost their innocence. Somehow they always find it again just in time to buy into the next bad idea.

Trade Talks

Alex Doherty — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 13:17:58 +0000

As hurricanes barrelled through the alphabet this year, pounding Anthony Barnett’s two acres of banana fields in St Thomas, Jamaica, his healthy respect for the forces of nature endured. But as the World Trade Organisation meets in Hong Kong this week, it is the deliberate demolition wrought by humankind he fears most.

“Globalisation seems to me like a system where the man with power uses a big stick to put the man without power in his place,” he says. “If you squeeze every last drop of blood from a Jamaican labourer and at the end of the day he hasn’t got enough money to send his children to school or put food on his table, then who benefits?”

It is a question that should be first on the agenda in Hong Kong. Between them the EU, the US and the multinationals will conspire to either abandon the poorest nations to the fate of the market or entrench them in their poverty, while denying them valuable market access to the west’s own vulnerable sectors.
Whether it is water provision in Bolivia or health insurance in Kenya, the WTO is set to cement international trading according to the golden rule – that those who have the gold make the rules.

Little wonder that, according to a Christian Aid poll, two-thirds of African trade delegations questioned said that their economies would suffer if they accept what is currently on offer, while more than half said they would halt the negotiations if they didn’t like what was on offer. They should follow their instincts, and other less developed nations and progressive NGOs should follow their lead. When the only thing on the menu is going to makeyou sick, it is time to walk away from the table.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Caribbean. At present the EU buys sugar at an inflated price from its former colonies – otherwise known as ACP countries (African, Caribbean and Pacific). The Brazilian government has challenged the practice as unfair. The EU has agreed to slash the price it pays for sugar by 36% over four years.

Meanwhile, the EU’s practice of giving preferential treatment to bananas from ACP countries has been challenged by Latin American states where multinational giants like Dole and Chiquita operate. In the past, the EU bought ACP bananas duty free while imposing a tariff on those from elsewhere. Now those tariffs will also be slashed, making ACP bananas relatively more expensive.

“Developing countries have been sacrificed in order for Europe to reach a deal,” says Jo Leadbeater, head of advocacy at Oxfam. “The commission has hurled money at its member states to convince them to sign up but has abandoned some of the world’s poorest countries to destitution.”

The result will be a double whammy for the Caribbean, where sugar and bananas are central to small national economies. Take St Vincent – a country with a population slightly lower than that of Huddersfield – where more than 50% of the workforce are in some way involved in bananas. The effect of these WTO rulings on a nation of that size will be analogous to a pit closure – but with tightening immigration all around there will be nowhere else for these people to go. Guyana was one of four countries in the Americas to benefit from the much-trumpeted debt relief initiative offered by the G8 – but its loss of income for sugar will wipe out all those benefits. The hurricane season is over; now global capital can finish the job for good.

According to the strict laws of comparative advantage, free-trade zealots have a point. Brazil produces sugar, and Dole and Chiquita produce bananas, far more cheaply than any Caribbean nation can. Even after the EU has slashed its sugar price it will be double what it can pay on the open market. The dollar bananas from Latin America may be tasteless and smothered in pesticides, but they are certainly cheap. Why not then clinch the deal that will give the British consumer the cheapest of everything and let these islands shift their resources to more effective sectors?

First, because while these changes will make a huge difference to the Caribbean they will make virtually none to the price of sugar and bananas. The nations concerned produce less than 2% of the world’s sugar and bananas, and the principal beneficiaries of these changes will be a handful of oligarchies in Brazil and central America, not the consumer.

Second, because Caribbean nations freely acknowledge the need to change. They want to diversify into different sectors – such as eco-tourism and offshore banking – and other parts of the industry, making sugar byproducts like ethanol, molasses and rum. But in such small nations the scope for change is limited, slow, and needs help. “You can’t adjust from a position of collapse,” says Richard Bernal, who heads the regional negotiating team for the Caribbean. “We need a reasonable amount of time as well as financial and technical assistance if we are going to change.”

The EU has offered 40m to the ACP countries in compensation for abandoning them; in stark contrast, it has offered European producers around 7bn to soften their blows in the upcoming deal.

Third, the very powerful blocs flagrantly flout the very rules they are pressuring these small nations to adhere to. American cotton and European agriculture are both subsidised to the hilt. US cotton farmers receive more in government subsidy than the entire economy of Burkina Faso, which produces cotton much cheaper – in direct breach of WTO rules. “We do well at sport because the playing field is even and the rules are public,” said African-American politician Jesse Jackson, referring to black Americans in the workforce. That applies just as well to the WTO. “But when we are kicking up the field and people start making up the rules … that’s when the problems start.”

And finally, there is more to life than trade and more to economics than the market price of commodities. Angela Stultz, who runs a local regeneration project in inner-city Kingston, anticipates those thrown off the cane and banana fields will end up in communities like hers, hustling to survive. “They will migrate to these kind of areas with mouths to feed and no money. That leads to frustration and desperation, and desperate people act desperately. They are driven by economic circumstances to survive.” This is precisely what happened in Jamaica when the North American Free Trade Agreement decimated the garment industry.

The Caribbean has become the principal shipping point for cocaine trafficking between the Americas and Europe. More than a fifth of the cocaine in the US arrives through that route, according to the National Drug Intelligence Centre. With the drugs come gun crime, gang activity and community collapse. Cheaper bananas and sugar come at a high price. We will pay for them with more police, probation, prisons, fear and fragmentation.

“These aren’t the poorest countries in the world,” says Glenys Kinnock MEP, who has lobbied hard for the Caribbean’s sugar and banana producers ahead of the forthcoming round. “They’re not the Congo. But that is what we are threatening them with.”

Making poverty history would be wonderful. Right now we have to stop making it the future.

A Class Act

Alex Doherty — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:34:07 +0000

‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year’s Eve in France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).

But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for a moment and take a look at the ocean. Those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose. Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the state was suing for peace with the offer of greater social justice. The government unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up on sink estates; a 1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who returned to work as well as 150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.

“We need to respond strongly and quickly to the undeniable problems facing many inhabitants of the deprived neighbourhoods,” said President Chirac. From the man who once said that immigrants had breached the “threshold of tolerance” and were sending French workers “mad” with their “noise and smell” this was progress indeed.

“The impossible becomes probable through struggle,” said the African American academic Manning Marable. “And the probable becomes reality.”

And the reality is that none of this would have happened without riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed, no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have written to their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases; what were the French and American revolutions but riots endowed by Enlightenment principles and then blessed by history?

When all non-violent, democratic means of achieving a just end are unavailable, redundant or exhausted, rioting is justifiable. When state agencies charged with protecting communities fail to do so or actually attack them, it may be necessary in self-defence.

After the 1967 riots in American cities, President Johnson set up the Kerner commission. It concluded: “What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” How else was such a damning indictment of racial discrimination in the US ever going to land on the president’s desk?

Following the inner-city riots across Britain in 1981, Lord Scarman argued that “urgent action” was needed to prevent racial disadvantage becoming an “endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society”. His conclusions weren’t perfect. But the kernel of a message black Britons had been trying to hammer home for decades suddenly took centre stage. A few years later Michael Heseltine wrote a report into the disturbances in Toxteth entitled It Takes a Riot.

Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishised, because ultimately it is a sign not of strength but weakness. Like a strike, it is often the last and most desperate weapon available to those with the least power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don’t do it because either they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic. Riots raise awareness of a situation, but they cannot solve it. For that you need democratic engagement and meaningful negotiation. Most powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a party – a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.

If Kerner and Scarman are anything to go by, the rioters will not be invited to help write the documents that could shape racial discourse for a generation. Nor are they likely to be the primary beneficiaries.

“During the 80s, everyone was desperate to have a black face in their organisation to show the race relations industry that they were allowing black people to get on,” says the editor of Race & Class, Ambalavaner Sivanandan. “So the people who made this mobility possible were those who took to the streets. But they did not benefit.” The same is true of the black American working class that produced Kerner.

Given these uncertain outcomes, riots carry great risk. The border between political violence and criminality becomes blurred, and legitimate protest risks degrading into impotent displays of hypermasculinity. Violence at that point becomes not the means to even a vague aspiration but the end in itself, and half the story gets missed. We heard little from young minority French women last week, even though they have been the primary target of the state’s secular dogma over the hijab.

Finally, violence polarises. The big winner of the last two weeks may yet prove to be Sarkozy. The presidential-hopeful courted the far-right with his calculated criticisms of the rioters; if he wins he could reverse any gains that may arise. Le Pen also lurks in the wings.

The riots in France run all these risks and yet have still managed to yield a precarious kind of progress. They demand our qualified and critical support.

Power has made its concessions. But how many, for how long and to whom depends on whether those who made the demands take their struggle from the margins to the mainstream: from the street to the corridors of power.

Stop Fetishising Integration

eddie — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:27:40 +0000

Where race is concerned there are, it seems, some words that just don’t go together. No matter how many young drunken white men beat each other up over the weekend, there is no such thing as white-on-white crime. No matter how many non-white people flee inner-city neighbourhoods for better schools and services, there is no such thing as “black flight”. And no matter how bitter their ethnic divides, white people never engage in “tribal conflict”.

And so it is that it seems to make no difference how segregated their lives, white people rarely ever seem to live in ghettoes. When a group of white people gather, they call it a country club, boardroom or – for most of the last century – House of Commons. But when non-white people reach a critical mass in any area, they always hit the G-spot – the point at which policymakers scream.
The cause of integration has become so fetishised since the July bombings that it has been elevated to the level of an intrinsic moral value – not a means to an end but an end in itself. Later this week the government-appointed task force will make integration a vital component of its report to Tony Blair on how to tackle Muslim extremism. In a speech in Manchester, Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, will warn against the country “sleep-walking” into a “New Orleans-style” quagmire of “fully fledged ghettoes”.

This is fine as far as it goes. The trouble is, unless integration is coupled with the equally vigorous pursuit of equality and anti-racism, it does not go very far. Rwanda had plenty of inter-ethnic marriages before the genocide; Jews were more integrated into German society than any other European nation before the Holocaust. Common sense suggests that the more contact you have with different races, religions and ethnicities, the less potential there is for stereotyping and dehumanising those different from yourself. But even that small achievement depends on the quality and power dynamics of the contact.

Take the American south. Despite preaching segregation in his presidential campaign, the late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond still slept with black women, like most white southern gentlemen. Black women breastfed and raised white children, and since most slave owners were not that wealthy, many black and white families shared the same roof.

The question was not whether the races could mix but what were the ground-rules for them mixing. These relationships were not consensual or mutual but usually coerced and one-sided. The whites-only signs kept African Americans from many a public place; but in the most intimate parts of their lives, black and white people were as integrated as they possibly could be.

In other words, the value of integration is contingent on whom you are asking to integrate, what you are asking them to integrate into and on what basis you are asking them to do so. The framing of the current debate is flawed on all three fronts. It treats integration as a one-way street – not a subtle process of cultural negotiation but full-scale assimilation of a religious group that is regarded, by many liberals and conservatives, as backward and reactionary. It is hardly surprising that many Muslims would not want to sign up to that.

But they would have a hard time trying even if they did. The racial group in Britain that has the hardest time integrating is white people. A YouGov poll for the Commission for Racial Equality last year showed that 83% of whites have no friends who are practising Muslims, while only 48% of non-white people do. It revealed that 94% of whites, compared with 47% of people from ethnic minorities, say most or all their friends are white. There is no good reason why white people should go out of their way to befriend ethnic minorities. But the truth is some go out of their way not to. A Mori poll for Prospect magazine last year showed that 41% of whites, compared with 26% of ethnic minorities, want the races to live separately.

Britain has a great many qualities where race is concerned. But the image so eagerly touted after the bombings, of an oasis of tolerant diversity that has been exploited by Islamic fundamentalists who hail from a community determined to voluntarily segregate, simply does not square with the facts. If fair play is a core British value, racism is no less so. According to Home Office figures, in 2003-2004 roughly 150 racially motivated incidents were reported every day; of those 100 fell into the serious category that includes wounding, assault and harassment.

Some are deadly, as in the case of the black teenager Anthony Walker, a devout Christian and would-be lawyer, standing at a bus stop with his white girlfriend. He looked about as integrated as you can be, but that didn’t stop him being killed by a single axe blow to the head, following a torrent of racial abuse.

But the most likely victims of race attacks are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis – the dominant ethnic groups among Muslims. And this was before the bombs sparked a significant rise in Islamophobia. All this is compounded by economic deprivation. Bangladeshis have the highest rate of unemployment, reaching just over 40% for men under 25. These people are not segregated; they are alienated. If they need to be integrated into anything as a matter of urgency, it is the workforce and the education system. A decent job with a decent income is still the best path out of the crudest forms of racism and fundamentalism. Polls and studies show a link between wealth and the propensity to integrate.

The reason black people could not get out of New Orleans was not because they were separate but because they were unequal – the wealthier ones left. Equality of opportunity is the driving force behind integration, not the other way round, but their relationship is subtle and symbiotic, not crude and causal.

July’s bombings blew a hole in assumptions, on the left and the right, about the link between race and desperation. The four young men who created bloody havoc led neither deprived nor segregated lives. Abdullah Jamal (formerly Jermaine Lindsay) was married to a white Englishwoman; Mohammad Sidique Khan was a graduate who helped children of all religions with learning difficulties; Hasib Hussain was sent to Pakistan only after he “went a bit wild” with drinking and swearing; Shehzad Tanweer was a graduate who used to help at his father’s fish-and-chip shop.

In July 5% of Muslims told an ICM poll that more bombings would be justified. Given the margin of error, this could be at least hundreds and at most thousands of potential suicide bombers. Whether it be Anthony Walker’s murderers or terrorists, we know it only takes a few.

Liberals must not give an inch to fundamentalism, whether racial, religious, ethnic or national. While its leaders must be ostracised, its followers must be won over. But either collective ethnic and racial identities are universally applicable, or they are not. If so then white people need a taskforce to discuss how to better police “their community” in order to marginalise extremists who kill in the name of white supremacy. If not then we need to move to a more sophisticated place that takes into account the degree to which our prejudices, pain and potential are all interlinked. If integration means anything, then it means we’re all in this together.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

No Tails or Tridents

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:05:42 +0000

In the Addams Family movie, Wednesday Addams heads off to a fancy dress Halloween party in her regular clothes. “I’m a homicidal maniac,” she explains when questioned by Morticia about her attire. “They look like everybody else.” Just over two weeks ago Jean Charles de Menezes “looked like everybody else” in London. But on Friday morning in the eyes of the travelling public and the police, he was transformed into a potential “homicidal maniac”.

In a clear indication of how terrorism not only destroys bodies but contaminates perceptions, fellow travellers say they saw an “Asian man” with “a bomb belt and wires coming out”. What they actually saw was a young Brazilian in a Puffa jacket. The police saw a threat. To them De Menezes looked like another “clean skin” (a perpetrator with no history of previous terrorist involvement or affiliation) on the run and possibly about to act. Having cornered him and pinned him to the ground they pumped five bullets into his head at close range.

In a world where every brown skin is little more than a “clean-skin” waiting to happen, stop and search will inevitably become stop and shoot. The dominant mood that we are better safe than sorry is understandable. But after Friday’s incident we are left with one man dead, nobody safe and everybody sorry. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past two years, it’s that a pre-emptive strike with no evidence causes more problems than it solves.

De Menezes’s killing came the day after the police presented Tony Blair with a shopping list of new measures they say they need to tackle terrorism. As though the plea not to allow terrorists to change our way of life does not apply to the authorities, they want to increase the amount of time they can detain a suspect without charge from 14 days to three months. Given that they already have the option of shooting unarmed, innocent people dead in the underground, the police clearly have more power than they can responsibly handle. But De Menezes’s death does not make the case against giving police extra anti-terrorist powers – it simply illustrates it.

Anti-terrorist legislation has a proven record of catching just about anyone apart from those for whom it was originally designed. We knew this way before September 11. According to Home Office statistics, 97% of those arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act – a series of draconian measures supposed to thwart the IRA – between 1974 and 1988 were released without charge. Only 1% were convicted and imprisoned.

The strike rate since the declaration of the war on terror has not been particularly impressive either. More than 700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since September 11, but half have been released without charge and only 17 convicted. Only three of the convictions relate to allegations of extremism related to militant Islamic groups.

And our allies in this bid to limit freedom at home so that we can ostensibly extend it abroad have not had much more success. According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, fewer than 10% of the people prosecuted for terrorism were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. Of those, few had any connection to al-Qaida while the remaining 90% were acquitted or convicted of lesser crimes like immigration violations or making false statements.

“The sum total of [greater police powers] is just to make people more frightened than ever,” says the human rights lawyer Gareth Pierce. “They feel defensive and defenceless, and none of that makes us any safer.” In the meantime, the abuse of these extra powers alienates the best potential resource any anti-terrorism unit can have – the communities from which terrorists emerge. This is what makes Friday’s shooting all the more damaging.

The Muslim Council of Britain, invited to Downing Street last week to discuss how to douse the flames of militant Islam, said it had received “numerous distressed calls” since the shootings. Muslims now have to balance their fear of suicide bombers with the fear of a paramilitary-style execution at the hands of London’s finest. That the victim was Brazilian will be of little comfort to Muslims. In the few seconds it takes to pull the trigger, nobody is going to ask whether they are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, British, Pakistani or Peruvian.

This is not an argument against offending Muslim sensibilities – though that case should be made often and forcefully. Muslims are no more keen on being slaughtered indiscriminately in the middle of the day than anyone else. And given many of the sites that the bombers have chosen (buses from Hackney, trains at Aldgate East and Edgware Road) Muslims are as likely to be victims as anyone else – if not more so. It is an argument for better intelligence. Given that the government denies any connection between terrorism and foreign policy, intelligent intelligence is our only hope.

But as the hunt continues for those involved in the last two terrorist incidents, the authorities appear no closer to devising a strategy for working out where the next one might come from. They have proven their skill to gather evidence to reconstruct what has happened after the fact; but are as yet unable to fathom the admittedly far more difficult task of how to gather the kind of intelligence that might prevent the fact itself.

For political and emotional reasons it has been necessary for some to dehumanise the bombers – to eviscerate them of all discernible purpose, cause and motivation. Stripped to their immoral minimum, they are simply “evil monsters”. For those who wish to vent or need to grieve, such a response is understandable.

Those looking for tails and tridents on the CCTV footage of the bombers will be disappointed. In the words of Wednesday Addams, they look like everybody else. If the security services are going to have any chance of infiltrating the bombers they must first humanise those involved. They need to find out what would motivate young men who apparently have so much to live for to die – and kill – in such a manner. Only then can they discover how to spot the determined and stop them in their tracks, and how to catch those vulnerable to their message before they fall into the clutches of the terrorists.

The only extra power the police need in this effort is the power of persuasion – the ability to gain the confidence of the Muslim community by convincing them that the aim is to catch terrorists, not to criminalise their community.

In February, after Sajid Badat, a 25-year-old ex-grammar school boy from Gloucester admitted planning to blow up a flight between Amsterdam and the US, the head of the Metropolitan police’s anti-terrorist branch, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, said: “We must ask how a young British man was transformed from an intelligent, articulate person who was well respected, into a person who has pleaded guilty to one of the most serious crimes that you can think of.”

A policy that lets the police shoot first and ask that question later will have a drastic effect on the kind of answer they are likely to get.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Blair's Blowback

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 12:25:51 +0000

Shortly after September 11 2001, when the slightest mention of a link between US foreign policy and the terrorist attacks brought accusations of heartless heresy, the then US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice got to work. Between public displays of grief and solemnity she managed to round up the senior staff of the National Security Council and ask them to think seriously about “how do you capitalise on these opportunities” to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world. In an interview with the New Yorker six months later, she said the US no longer had a problem defining its post-cold war role. “I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen. Events are in much sharper relief.”

For those interested in keeping the earth intact in its present shape so that we might one day live on it peacefully, the bombings of July 7 provide no such “opportunities”. They do not “clarify” or “sharpen” but muddy and bloody already murky waters. As the identities of the missing emerge, we move from a statistical body count to the tragedy of human loss – brothers, mothers, lovers and daughters cruelly blown away as they headed to work. The space to mourn these losses must be respected. The demand that we abandon rational thought, contextual analysis and critical appraisal of why this happened and what we can do to limit the chances that it will happen again, should not. To explain is not to excuse; to criticise is not to capitulate.

We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not be equated – with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with. “Collateral damage” always has a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand action.

These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market. They were clearly absent from the minds of those who bombed London last week. They are no less absent from the minds of those who have pursued the war on terror for the past four years.

Tony Blair is not responsible for the more than 50 dead and 700 injured on Thursday. In all likelihood, “jihadists” are. But he is partly responsible for the 100,000 people who have been killed in Iraq. And even at this early stage there is a far clearer logic linking these two events than there ever was tying Saddam Hussein to either 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

It is no mystery why those who have backed the war in Iraq would refute this connection. With each and every setback, from the lack of UN endorsement right through to the continuing strength of the insurgency, they go ever deeper into denial. Their sophistry has now mutated into a form of political autism – their ability to engage with the world around them has been severely impaired by their adherence to a flawed and fatal project. To say that terrorists would have targeted us even if we hadn’t gone into Iraq is a bit like a smoker justifying their habit by saying, “I could get run over crossing the street tomorrow.” True, but the certain health risks of cigarettes are more akin to playing chicken on a four-lane highway. They have the effect of bringing that fatal, fateful day much closer than it might otherwise be.

Similarly, invading Iraq clearly made us a target. Did Downing Street really think it could declare a war on terror and that terror would not fight back? That, in itself, is not a reason to withdraw troops if having them there is the right thing to do. But since it isn’t and never was, it provides a compelling reason to change course before more people are killed here or there. So the prime minister got it partly right on Saturday when he said: “I think this type of terrorism has very deep roots. As well as dealing with the consequences of this – trying to protect ourselves as much as any civil society can – you have to try to pull it up by its roots.”

What he would not acknowledge is that his alliance with President George Bush has been sowing the seeds and fertilising the soil in the Gulf, for yet more to grow. The invasion and occupation of Iraq – illegal, immoral and inept – provided the Arab world with one more legitimate grievance. Bush laid down the gauntlet: you’re either with us or with the terrorists. A small minority of young Muslims looked at the values displayed in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and Camp Bread Basket – and made their choice. The war helped transform Iraq from a vicious, secular dictatorship with no links to international terrorism into a magnet and training ground for those determined to commit terrorist atrocities. Meanwhile, it diverted our attention and resources from the very people we should have been fighting – al-Qaida.

Leftwing axe-grinding? As early as February 2003 the joint intelligence committee reported that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent “by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq”. At the World Economic Forum last year, Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group thinktank, said: “The net result of the war on terror is more war and more terror. Look at Iraq: the least plausible reason for going to war – terrorism – has been its most harrowing consequence.”

None of that justifies what the bombers did. But it does help explain how we got where we are and what we need to do to move to a safer place. If Blair didn’t know the invasion would make us more vulnerable, he is negligent; if he did, then he should take responsibility for his part in this. That does not mean we deserved what was coming. It means we deserve a lot better.

Detox Our Racist Culture

Mon, 16 May 2005 08:29:13 +0000

Have you ever thought about what Britain would look like if the effects of postwar migration were suddenly reversed? Tellingly, most of parliament, our corporate boardrooms and newspaper editorial meetings would look much the same. But quite how these people would get to work, as public transport in most major cities stalled and minicabs became scarce is another matter. They would arrive in offices with floors unmopped and canteens closed. Going out for lunch, they would suffer a two-hour wait at McDonalds. And the absence of fruit pickers would bring a run on tin-openers and unseemly scrambles for fresh produce.

With the Premiership closed down, our Olympic ambitions in tatters and music stations struggling to fill airtime, the Last Night of the Proms could again make a play as the nation’s signature cultural event. With most pharmacies abandoned and the NHS collapsed, we would once again be the sick man of Europe.

“Just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work,” wrote John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley back in 1960, in a passage that could equally apply to the UK today. “I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.”

Herein lies the primary tension between the two conflicting and apparently contradictory trends regarding immigration throughout the west. Economically, without the huge pool of cheap labour emanating from the developing world, documented or not, we simply could not function as we do at present. Politically, if Britain’s last election campaign is anything to go by, without scapegoating and marginalising that same pool of labour it appears our political culture would be unable to function.

So we are left despising the very people on whom we depend, and immigrants are left with the worst of all worlds – economically exploited and socially demonised. Vulnerable to unscrupulous employers, opportunistic politicians and racist hatemongers, they work simply to exist in a place where their very existence has become an affront.

We should not be in denial that there is a problem with immigration. A system where the poor are forced to arrive in the most perilous of circumstances – in hock to smugglers, hanging on the bottom of trains, hiding in trucks or huddled in the cargo holds of planes – is in serious need of repair. The question is not whether we should have a debate about it but whether that debate will be honest and progressive, or deceitful and reactionary. Will these repairs take place in the interests of big business and bigotry, or of the most vulnerable, whether they were born here or not?

No forward-thinking approach to this issue can be promoted against the backdrop of the white cliffs of Dover, as Tony Blair did shortly before the election. The promise of 600 more immigration officers to target “removals and enforcement operations in respect of failed asylum applicants and illegal immigrants” as a response to Michael Howard’s shameless bigotry was worse than inadequate. For a party dedicated to modernisation, Blair’s rhetoric was prehistoric: New Labour, old racism. To sustain a progressive consensus on immigration we must appeal to people’s humanism and nurture a sense of internationalism, not pander to their xenophobia and malevolence.

For it is the thrust of globalisation that underpins the direction and scale of immigration. There can be no candid discussion of immigration to the developed world, let alone a liberal response to it, that does not take account of poverty in the developing world. That means fair trade, universal and enforceable labour standards, and international development. At home and abroad the west can only afford the standard of living to which it has become accustomed – be it food, clothes, minicabs or domestic services – as a result of cheap foreign labour. But while we pursue an international trade policy that allows capital to roam freely across borders in search of the low wages, we pursue a domestic agenda to stop poor people from travelling in search of better wages. The higher walls we build to keep people out do not prevent the desperate from trying to scale them; it simply criminalises those who make it over.

Their illegality compounds the problem, since it renders their labour cheaper still. They are less likely to organise for higher wages, complain about poor working conditions or be eligible, let alone apply, for state benefits. In short, they are more desperate and vulnerable, and therefore more likely to undercut wages and earn the resentment of local working people. Business takes the profit, the immigrants get the prejudice.

There is nothing inevitable about this. If the only way we can enjoy our standard of living is through other people’s poverty and misery then maybe we should live within our moral means. True, there aren’t many votes in that; but then there weren’t many votes in bombing Iraq either. And this, at least, has the benefit of being the right thing to do.

Similarly, if our political culture is addicted to racist invective then it is high time we went into detox. “How far trouble between white and black people can be avoided in future if the coloured community continues to increase is a matter for speculation,” read a cabinet minute from 1953, advocating immigration controls. Half a century later, the population has risen at a far slower rate than life expectancy, leaving us with an ageing, multi-racial population with acute labour shortages. Indeed everything seems to have changed apart from the political discourse, with Howard still claiming that to avoid racial tension there has to be “confidence that there is a proper system of [immigration] control”.

That Labour has a vested interest in turning this debate around should be self-evident. One of the most consistent causes of scandal has involved getting or keeping people in the country. The former home secretary David Blunkett was laid low by his attempt to cut through his own red tape to get a visa for his love child’s foreign nanny. Cherie Blair came under fire after allegations that she had intervened to prevent the deportation of her confidante’s boyfriend. Peter Mandelson was forced out the second time amid claims that he was involved in a passport application for the Hinduja brothers.

A more honest and liberal approach to immigration would remove the one issue where Labour looked vulnerable. Its weakness on immigration was, in large part, a result of its pandering to racism. Blunkett routinely conflated race and immigration, and Anthony Giddens, architect of the third way, advocated a policy of “tough on immigration, but tough on the causes of hostility to immigrants”, as though the presence of immigrants was the cause of discrimination. Labour claimed its hard line would see off organised racism. But as the Tory campaign suggests – along with the rise in racist attacks and that of the British National party – it only encouraged it.

Howard took the ball and ran with it, but only after New Labour had scored an own goal.

Playing the Loyalty Card

Mon, 02 May 2005 18:12:52 +0000

For a party that long ago abandoned any pretence of class struggle, class envy seems to come easily to New Labour. Redressing economic inequality through more progressive taxation of the rich is out. Ridiculing the wealthy who refuse to support them regardless of what they do is, apparently, in.

First to the barricades is Peter Hain, who defines the rich not by what they earn or own but what they drink. “There’s now a kind of dinner party critic who quaffs shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly says, ‘You are no different from the Tories’,” he said recently. “Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off; it’s not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It’s not a luxury.” Other advocates for New Labour have slammed Labour defectors for their “bruschetta orthodoxies” and lambasted anyone who refuses to vote Labour as a result of the war as “decadent” and “self-indulgent”.

We will come back to Mr Hain’s constituency later. For now let us examine the basis on which New Labour and its supporters are attempting to shame the liberal bourgeoisie back into the fold in time for polling day. The substance of the allegation is pretty straightforward. Poor people need a Labour government for health, education and the minimum wage. Such things are of little consequence to the middle classes, who are preoccupied with such trivial matters as war. So the haves who seek to punish New Labour because of the dead in Falluja are selfish. By taking their votes elsewhere they will be punishing the have-nots by letting in a Tory government. In short, conscience is the preserve of the idle rich; the toiling masses have more basic needs that only Labour can fulfil.

Baseless in fact and flawed in logic, this argument marks the brazen, self-serving scaremongering of a party whose most attractive feature is not what it will do or has done but what it is not – the Conservatives. The omission of the Iraqi poor – not to mention those murdered, tortured and injured in our name – from this “lifeline” renders it morally specious. But every time Michael Howard leers from the screen such threats are newly endowed with an urgent appeal.

So first, some facts. There is as much veracity to the claim that voting for the Liberal Democrats will let the Tories through the back door as there was that Saddam Hussein was 45 minutes from killing us all. A study by the Independent revealed that a swing of 11.5% from Labour to the Lib Dems would indeed deprive Labour of its overall majority. But even if the defections were twice that rate, it would still be “virtually impossible” to let in a Conservative government. “It is highly unlikely any swing could result in the Conservatives becoming the largest party,” according to John Curtice, a psephologist and professor of politics at Stratchclyde university. “The most likely consequence of any large switch from Labour to the Liberal Democrats is simply nobody would have overall control.”

If this does happen it won’t be because Tory Svengali Lynton Crosby has demotivated the Labour vote, but because the government has. But the fact that so many on the left feel morally compromised by voting for Tony Blair suggests not that there is something wrong with their morality but that there is something wrong with Labour. Indeed, New Labour was founded on the principle that, unlike old Labour, it had to reconnect with voters’ concerns in order to win. Somewhere along the way that lesson was lost. Now the government claims any losses will not be its fault for pursuing a course that voters will reject: it will be the voters’ fault for refusing to accept the course New Labour has imposed.

Each individual is responsible for the choice they make on polling day; the parties are responsible for crafting an agenda and developing a record that people will want to choose. The surest sign that a political party is in trouble is when it blames the electorate for not supporting it.

Thursday has been a long time coming and this government have had plenty of opportunity to be prepared for it. A million of us warned them on February 15 2003 when we took to the streets against the war. Many also warned them on June 10 2004, the date of the European and local elections. But nothing happened. Yet now they demand loyalty where none has been shown.

Many used their clothes pegs in 2001, after the bombing of Serbia, the asylum bill and student loans. This time round they will need blindfolds and earmuffs as well. Decadence is believing you are not accountable for the consequences of your actions. Let those accusations be laid at the doorstep of 10 Downing Street before they make their way to any mythical dinner party. For only then will it become clear that Labour’s principal weakness is not middle-class petulance but working-class indifference. Its defeats in byelections at the hands of the Lib Dems have taken place not in leafy suburbs but poor urban areas such as Brent East and Leicester South. In the local council elections, they lost towns and cities like Cardiff, Doncaster, Leeds and Newcastle upon Tyne. These were hardly plots hatched last summer in Tuscany.

In all of this the war has been emblematic. The vast majority of defectors on Thursday will not switch in solidarity with the people of Sadr City. They will do so because the war has symbolised much of what is wrong with New Labour – its contempt for its constituency, and democracy delivered with arrogance and spin. “If the political context were right, people would support regime change,” said Blair before the war, according to a secret document leaked to the Sunday Times.

Cook up the pretext and people will swallow it; if they don’t, we’ll shove it down their throats. Never mind if they gag. We know what’s best for them. Trust is the currency. Having spent it on Iraq, Blair is unable to use it elsewhere.

Having failed to persuade, they must now resort to pillory. But does Jessica Haigh, the student who assailed Blair as he toured a shopping centre in Leeds, look like a dilettante to you? She grew up in a Labour-voting household and is about to cast her first vote for the Lib Dems because she is disillusioned. And what about her father, Mick, 51, a former teacher from Ramshill, Scarbor ough, who was a party member for 36 years and the election agent for his hometown’s first Labour MP in 1997? Was he soused on pinot grigio when he said of his daughter: “She is doing the job that senior members of the Labour party should be doing. I think her views are shared by many in the party and those who have left.”

Which brings us back to Peter Hain’s constituency of Neath. If his working-class constituents are in desperate need of a Labour government, nobody seems to have told them. True, he has a 14,816 majority. But since 1997 turnout in Neath has fallen by 22.5% and his majority has slumped by 38%. If Labour gets a drubbing on Thursday don’t blame the crowd at the wine bar. That’ll be the beer talking.

Cruel and Usual

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 08:58:01 +0000

In mid January, Chancellor Gordon Brown went to Africa in a bid to relieve the locals of the burden of their debt and Britain from the burden of its history.

“The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over,” he argued. “We should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.”

Less than a week later, photographs from Camp Breadbasket showed British soldiers standing on Iraqis enmeshed in netting, forcing them to simulate oral and anal sex, feigning to punch them in the head and parading them around on forklift trucks. Their actions suggested that while Brown was busy unilaterally absolving the inequities of our colonial past, the Iraqis are still dealing with the iniquities of our colonial present.

Like the US government following revelations from Abu Ghraib, the British government wants to dismiss the miscreants as the deviant wrongdoers in an otherwise noble cause. But the truth is that the atrocities committed in Camp Breadbasket were not aberrant but as consistent with Britain’s colonial tradition and invasion of Iraq as Brown’s statements are with our post-colonial amnesia.

The evidence arising from the case suggests that some other enduring values – brutality, cruelty, oppression and racism – are more readily associated with British rule in much of the world from Ireland to India.

And the ensuing show trial, in which subordinates were made to take full responsibility for policies and practices that were both endemic to the army and systemic to the Iraqi occupation, suggests that the traditions of “fair play” and “openness” are inimical to foreign occupation.

The fact that the photographs were released shortly before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz should remind us that “following orders” is inadequate where the violation of human rights is concerned. But it should also teach us that there is a context for these atrocities that should never be overlooked.

From former BBC director general Greg Dyke to Corporal Kenyon, everybody has taken responsibility for what they have done in this war, apart from those who took us into it.

Tony Blair described the photographs as “shocking and appalling”. He told the Commons that “the difference between democracy and tyranny is not that in a democracy bad things don’t happen, but that in a democracy when they do happen people are held and brought to account”.

The difference between “democracy” and “tyranny” may be lost on a man suspended from a forklift truck by a foreign occupier. Similarly, the difference between what is intended by “shock and awe” and what constitutes “shocking and appalling” may be lost on the soldier impaling him, not least when his commanding officer has told them to go “Ali Baba hunting” for those looting supplies and “work them hard” if he finds them.

Indeed, probably about the only thing that the Iraqi pris oners, their tormentors and the judge who sentenced them can agree on is that even those immediately responsible have not been brought to account.

Corporal Daniel Kenyon, the most senior officer on trial, said he thought that reporting the abuses would be pointless. “There was no point in passing anything up the chain of command because it was the chain of command who were, in my eyes, doing wrongdoing, and they were passing Iraqis down to us to do the same thing.”

Meanwhile, Ra’id Attiyah Ali told the Independent that even though he worked in the camp and was not a looter, he was none the less beaten on the nose and tied to a pole for an hour and a half.

“I saw the soldiers kicking and beating Iraqis, I saw the guy who was held in a net,” he said. “I saw five Iraqis in their underwear holding milk cartons on their head, I saw a soldier urinating on them. There were about eight soldiers.”

Judge Advocate Michael Hunter, who presided over the case, told the jury: “It’s quite possible, in the view of this court, that people in the course of that operation were hit and assaulted and others have not been brought to justice, and this could have been avoided.”

Sadly we have been here before. In Imperial Reckoning, Caroline Elkins’ book on Britain’s role in Kenya, she quotes a white settler’s account of “softening up” a Mau Mau: “By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket … he died before we got much out of him.”

In 1955, when Labour stood for more than office, Barbara Castle spoke up: “In the heart of the British Empire there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where the murder and torture of Africans by Europeans goes unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation. And at last the Labour party has declared war on this state of affairs.”

The Labour party has declared war all right. But the war it has declared won’t end this state of affairs. It started them.