The May issue of The World Today, the monthly magazine published by Chatham House, includes an article by Leader of the House, Jack Straw MP on identity and democracy.

Straw writes that changes to the UK’s heterogeneity are having a ‘profound effect’ on British society and that ‘the core democratic values of freedom, fairness, tolerance and plurality’ that define what it is to be British should be set out in a ‘non-negotiable’ contract. But to what extent are freedom, fairness, tolerance and plurality distinctly British? Are they not values that many share? What is uniquely ‘British’ about them?

He also argues that the United States is one of the countries that successfully defines its sense of citizenship by telling ‘heroic stories’ of, for instance, how America came to be America. This is a somewhat curious observation given the testimony of Jessica Lynch (the Iraq war veteran) to a U.S Congressional hearing last week, during which she complained of being turned into a heroine for PR purposes by the Pentagon - Lynch said ”I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary.”  

You can read Straws musings on this topic here.

The poverty rate for Britain’s minority ethnic groups stands at 40%, double the 20% found amongst white British people, according to new research published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).  Minority ethnic groups are also being overlooked for jobs and are being paid lower wages, despite improvements in education and qualifications.

The research highlights the differences between minority ethnic groups with 65% of Bangladeshis living in poverty compared to 55% of Pakistanis, 45% of Black Africans and 30% of Indians and Black Caribbeans. Over half of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black African children in the UK are growing up in poverty with a staggering 70% of Bangladeshi children growing up poor.

The research shows that people from minority ethnic groups who have higher educational achievements do not receive the same rewards as those from white British backgrounds with similar qualifications. A wide range of factors are shown to affect different groups and the research highlights how the Government needs to consider and implement more targeted policies.

The results of the project are unsurprising when one considers that there is a 16% employment gap between ethnic minorities and the population as a whole. Educational qualifications, employment sector, labour market experience, discrimination, location, disability, ill health and family form and structure were all found to play a role in different poverty rates.

When the contribution of individual characteristics (such as fewer qualifications) to employment disadvantage was analysed, there were some unexplained outcomes. For example, Black Africans were found to have very high rates of higher education qualifications, but also suffer from high rates of unemployment and poor occupational outcomes. This ‘ethnic penalty’ includes the effects of discrimination.

Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Rushanara Ali, an Associate Director of the Young Foundation and former aide to Oona King, who was selected on Saturday as the Labour prospective parliamenatary candidate in Bethnal Green & Bow. She will mount a stong challenge to Respect who currently hold the seat. George Galloway has said he will not recontest it and so a new Respect candidate is to be selected.

Labour deputy leadership frontrunner, Jon Cruddas MP, argues that we need to do more to help remitters make the most of the money they send to relatives in the least developed countries in the world.

I was a signatory to an Early Day Motion tabled in the House of Commons last November which supported a courageous campaign being waged by City office cleaners. The cleaners, who earn as little as £5.35p per hour, were demanding better pay and conditions. They are just some of the countless, low paid workers who keep our economy on its feet, increasing numbers of whom are migrants from developing countries.

Contrary to the “benefit scroungers” image painted by the tabloid press, many migrants struggle to make ends meet. They often work long hours, are poorly paid and hold down several jobs at a time. Despite these hardships, migrant workers here from developing countries manage to send money – referred to as “remittances” – to their families in their countries of origin, which it is estimated totaled more than £2.3 billion last year. The main recipients of these remittances are India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, China, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana.

The World Bank estimates that remittance flows from migrants to developing countries globally is more than twice as large as official overseas development aid. As Treasury minister Ed Balls MP said in his answers to my parliamentary questions on this topic,
“remittances are an increasingly important source of development finance and can have a significant positive economic impact in developing countries.”

Research commissioned by the Department for International Development shows that remittances are spent mostly on basic subsistence needs such as clothing, education, food and health. So remittances help meet the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and increasing access to education and health. In Bangladesh and Ghana alone, it is estimated that remittance flows have helped reduce poverty by 6% and 5% respectively.

The advantage with remittances is that they go direct to the people that need them. They are not sent to recipients through bureaucratic NGOs which often have costly overheads which eat into aid, nor are they sent through the developing countries’ governments, many of which are ridden with corruption.

Concerns have been raised that remittances may be used for terrorist purposes. However, the money transfer companies have to comply with the same tough anti-money laundering measures introduced in the wake of 9/11 as the rest of the finance industry.

It has also been suggested that there is a danger of remittances being viewed as a substitute for official overseas development aid, but no one is pretending remittances can replace official aid or the partnerships which have been established to help deliver services to the world’s poor.

The government has done a lot of work to increase competition and transparency in the money transfer market for remitters by, for example, establishing the www.sendmoneyhome.org website, for which it deserves credit. But we must go further. We must look at other ways of ensuring remitters can make the most of the money they send to relatives in the least developed countries in the world. I do not claim to have all the answers in this respect, but here are just two ideas.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Electoral Reform Society’s Michael Calderbank explains how a major shake-up of our democratic system is necessary to see off the BNP threat. 

At the national conference of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) earlier this year, it was repeatedly claimed that ‘people know which party is best placed to defeat the BNP’. The conference was told that, when combined with grassroots campaigns to expose the ‘nazi’ character of the party, targeted campaigns to maximise the anti-racist vote can be used to mobilise the mainstream majority.

From this perspective the challenge facing anti-racist forces is clear: we must put all our energies into a mass campaign aimed at informing voters and encouraging them to cast their votes most effectively to keep BNP candidates out. It is possible to point to individual instances in which such action appears to have been effective. However, in general such a strategy holds only if certain assumptions are already in place. Sadly, the reality confronting anti-racist activists on the ground is more complex than this simple ‘educate and mobilise’ philosophy will allow.

For example, this takes for granted that the BNP successfully appeals to voters by managing to disguise its viciously racist core beliefs, and that voters only need reminding of the party’s ‘true’ face in order to persuade them of the need to switch away. It is of course true that BNP voters are not all ideologically paid-up fascists consumed solely by racist hatred. In the real world the motivations of far right voters are far more complex. The far right vote tends to grow in areas where people feel entirely neglected by, and alienated from, the mainstream political parties and see a party like the BNP as the best way of making the political establishment take notice.

So whilst people are not solely voting BNP because of their deeply objectionable racism, it does not appear that they entertain such views are in themselves sufficient to repel BNP voters. Indeed it is the very fact that voting for such a party has the power to scandalize the political establishment that seems to make a vote for the BNP a significant form of protest. The adoption of a ‘respectable’ media image is not simply an attempt to fool the voter, but a more sophisticated attempt both to facilitate an appeal to racist prejudice whilst disavowing the full scale of their anti-democratic extremism.

Read the rest of this entry »

The dust has far from settled on the Nigerian presidential election, with observers calling into question the legitimacy of the poll, and plentiful reports of vote rigging and violence.

The British Guardian today reports that the PDP candidate Umaru Yar’Adua won 1.8m votes in Rivers state against a combined total of just 109,000 for the two main opposition candidates, while in Delta state he received 1.2m votes to 42,000 for the opposition. These are just two examples of highly dubious results.

The Guardian’s Nigerian namesake, reports that the other presidential candidates are protesting against Yar’Adua’s victory and street demonstrations area being organised.

And the response of the present incumbent - President Obasanjo - who, incidentally, will remain party leader of the PDP,  to the result and the concerns raised?
If Nigerians do not like the victory of his handpicked successor they will have an opportunity to vote again in four years.

Meanwhile Nigerians continue to struggle with 1 in 5 children not making it to the age of five and rampant poverty amongst the vast majority of the population.  In the UK we say we get the politicians we deserve; surely the same cannot be said of the Nigerian people who have to make do the present shambles.

The Nigerian election commission has just announced that the ruling People’s Democratic Party candidate, Umaru Yar’Adua, has won the Presidential election there. More details and comment to follow.

Voting took place in Nigeria yesterday in the parliamentary and presidential elections.

Observers have reported ballot stuffing, multiple voting, delayed polling and vote buying around the country, which has cast a shadow over the elections. On Friday there was even an attempt to blow up the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters in the capital, Abuja, by ramming a petrol taker with gas cylinders into the building - the vehicle missed its target.

If power passes smoothly to the winner of the presidential election - the handover is scheduled for 29 May - it will be the first transition of power from one civilian administration to another in Nigeria since independence in 1960.

The main contenders in the presidential race are the present Vice President, Atiku Abubakar for the Action Congress, Muhammadu Buhari for the All Nigeria People’s Party and the favourite, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, for the governing People’s Democratic Party.

The candidates are marked more by their tribal and religious identities, than by their places on the political spectrum, such is electoral politics in West Africa, where politics is dominated by personalities and people vote along tribal and religious lines.

In the UK, policy (and, to a lesser extent, ideology) is a major determinant of how people vote; in West Africa it is not. What does this tell us about democracy? Do the routine disturbances and hap-hazard way democracy is conducted in West Africa demonstrate that democracy is essentially a Western concept, ill suited to West Africa? Why should we presume Western style democracy is superior to traditional forms of governance in West Africa and elsewhere?

Jon Trickett MP, Chair of the Compass Group of MPs and Labour MP for Hemsworth, explains how Labour’s core constituencies, including ethnic minority groups, have defected since 1997 and the scale of the electoral task Labour faces as it seeks a fourth term under a new leader.

There is much talk about the imminent departure of Tony Blair and whether a new leader can gain a stunning fourth election victory for Labour.

Some leading politicians and media pundits suggest a strategy which might be summarised as “Blairism without Blair”. But such a tactic would lead back to a politics of the past, rooted in the 1980s and 1990s.

New analysis shows that a simple change of leader will not be enough to win. The electoral coalition that brought New Labour to power in 1997 has unravelled. A change of direction, based on an understanding of Britain as it is now, is needed to build a new basis for support.

New Labour ministers cling to the rhetoric that only the politics of unremitting New Labour, based on an assessment of Britain in the 1990s, will keep the party in power; but the facts do not back this up.

The truth is that the 1997 New Labour formula did not win the last election. Careful analysis of the last two election results reveals that the 1997 coalition had begun to disintegrate by 2001 and ceased to exist by 2005. It was only lucky for us that there has, until now, been no appetite in the country for the Tory alternative.

Over the last decade around 15 million people identified themselves with Labour in opinion polls. Of these, 14m voted for New Labour in 1997. By 2005 less than 10m of those people could bring themselves to vote for the party. Another five million natural Labour supporters, people who said they were Labour, either stayed at home or voted for (largely non-Tory) political alternatives. New Labour won in 2005 because of an even more disastrous performance by the Tory party which managed to poll even fewer votes than it had in 1997.

Examination of those Labour identifiers who voted for the party in 2005 reveals even more worrying developments. Less than half (45%) said they were actually enthused by Labour’s policies and over half (53%) said they wanted to see Labour punished with a reduced majority. Those who stayed true to New Labour in 2005 did so because they wanted to stop the Tories and saw no other political alternative. Read the rest of this entry »

The Labour Party this week announced the shortlist for the selection of a new parliamentary candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow to succeed the last candidate there, Oona King. King famously lost to the current incumbent Respect MP, “Gorgeous” George Galloway (pictured). The selection vote takes place on Saturday 28th April. With five of the six candidates being of Bangladeshi origin, there is a good chance that an ethnic minority candidate will be selected. The question is whether Labour can beat Respect to add to their tally of ethnic minority MPs?

Here are some details of the short listed contenders:

Cllr Helal Abbas: Tower Hamlets local councillor; has lived, worked and run businesses in Spitalfields & Banglatown for many years; he serves as a school governor at Cannon Barnett and Osmaini School and works for a London charity.

Rushanara Ali: an Associate Director of the Young Foundation; she is responsible for research, international work and external relations there and joined the Foundation in March 2005.

John Biggs AM: London Assembly Member for the City and East London since 2004; formerly Leader of Tower Hamlets Council and prior to this its opposition; previously worked variously as a laboratory technician, as a systems analyst in the City of London and as the Director of the Socialist Health Association, graduate of Chemistry and Law; he is also a non practising lawyer.

Rupa Huq: a senior lecturer in sociology at Kingston University where she specialises in youth culture and politics; she is a columnist for Bangla Mirror and appears regularly in the Times Higher Education Supplement and other media; Labour parliamentary candidate in Chesham and Amersham in the 2005 general election and European parliamentary candidate in the North West in 2004 European.

Cllr Shiria Khatun: a Tower Hamlets local councillor; she is a married young mum and has lived in Tower Hamlets for almost thirty years; she is a local school governor and has held a number of voluntary community roles including serving as Vice Chair of Lansbury Estate Board and a school governor.

Cllr Lutfur Rahman: a Tower Hamlets local councillor; he has lived in Tower Hamlets well over thirty years and attended local schools; he is a solicitor and led the award-winning education and youth services for Tower Hamlets for two years.