Michael Wilshaw- sorry I’m not your Dad. I am a secondary school teacher in an inner-city London school. Overall, I love my job. I love the challenge, the creativity and I am passionate about education. I’m also pretty damn good at it. However, as I came home tonight (carrying a class set of 30 books that will take at least 4 hours out of Sunday) and switched on my computer, I was insulted by the very person who is supposed to be ‘improving’ our education system. Chief Inspector of OFSTED, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has come out with yet another inflammatory remark against us teachers; the pillars of our education system. Is this supposed to be motivational?

He claims that we don’t understand stress. He claims that we need to be unemployed or juggling 5 anti-social jobs to pull enough money together for a loaf of bread, in order to understand stress. And Gove says this man is supposed to be a ‘visionary’!? I’m fed up of this Tory-boy rhetoric that hails poverty, suffering and misery as some kind of benchmark from which our ingratitude can be calculated. I am sure that social commentator, Charles Dickens, did not expect the characters of ‘Oliver Twist’ and humble blacksmith ‘Joe Gargery’ to become blueprints for modern living. My interpretation (and I am an English Teacher!) has always been that he would expect readers to critique the very system that engenders such disparity of existence; not to feel perpetually grateful that they’re not Oliver!

Yes- I am able to afford to go on holiday, yes-I do not starve on a regular basis and I do get a small amount of time to spend with my family. I am, however, inclined to acknowledge these as my rights and, as such, refuse to flatter my benevolent masters with thanks; especially considering that I am unlikely be able to afford such privileges as ‘owning my own home’ (privileges guaranteed to the privately-educated elite who sit in offices thinking up legislation that drastically increases my workload).

Sir Michael, and those who share his ideology, relate to teachers as a feudal master relates to his serf. Everything we create deserves to be passed upwards for inspection and, the more pressure that is applied to us, the more we are expected to produce. In addition, we are effectively indentured. Many corrupt headteachers (including one for whom I have worked) withhold, or smear, references in order to retain staff. Such practice goes unchallenged by the DFE and even the teaching unions. (What are they supposed to do when privatisation has allowed our state education system to be run by a handful of bosses?) Is this the ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ that our current economic system encourages? Something akin to feudalism?

We are not servants. We are supposed to be allowed autonomy, creativity and growth. Why, then, are we being constantly reminded that we are ‘lucky’ if we can expect the bare minimum? And everyone seems to feel entitled to a say on what we do. Following Wilshaw’s logic through, teachers are the modern equivalent of Guy Fawkes, and the fire’s being stoked by a load of angry Oliver Twists.

I, obviously, take offense at the archaic notion that teachers have an easy ride. This is, so clearly, a cheap branch of rhetoric designed to undermine a well-unionised profession. More offensive, however, is the idea that we are indulgent and lazy because we are not living in destitution. The Coalition Government are expecting us to buy into this ridiculous narrative. What’s the easiest way of doing this? demonize the easily-resented; teachers- with their inconvenient holidays and their ‘short working day’ (aka 60 hour working weeks, when cutting corners). Divide and rule. Create martyrs (Wilshaw’s Dad). Prevent autonomy…. Come on! Do we really need to point out what’s going on here? It’s so painfully transparent.

Times are challenging for many, many people and it serves our leaders well to vilify teachers. If Michael Wishaw can deem more teachers unsatisfactory, and Michael Gove can introduce performance-related pay through his new national standards, experienced (and therefore expensive) teachers can be demoted to save money. Again, so obvious.

You may agree that teachers pay should not go ‘unchallenged’. Everyone remembers a teacher that made their life hell. Nobody supports a deliberately ‘bad’ teacher (of which there are very few). What is crazy, however, is that anyone would trust Wilshaw and the academy bosses to be making these decisions, when they are the same people who are responsible for exam cheating in the name of profit. If you want to ensure that the public purse is accountable, turn your attention to a school in south London where at least two members of staff are currently being paid their full salary to stay at home. Why? Because they dared to question the regime of their academy boss. A regime which expects you to work saturday mornings for no extra pay, and a head who actually told their staff ‘not to enjoy their christmas’ because OFSTED was looming.

Join the pieces together. If we allow this ideology to prevail, we’re giving power to all of the wrong people. Our expectations are humble; not indulgent.

S. O’Reilly

By Luke Cooper

Perhaps it was inevitable that attention would focus on François Hollande’s defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy, in what is undoubtedly a major blow to Europe’s political right. After all, the fall of Sarkozy potentially undermines the Franco-German consensus at the heart of the EU project, and leaves German Chancellor Angela Merkel more isolated than before. But it is Greece – a country that has been in recession for nearly five years and whose people have suffered austerity on a level unimaginable in other Western states – where parliamentary elections may prove to be a watershed moment for “Europe”.

That’s not Europe as in the geographical land mass, but the “project of Europe” as it was conceived in the Treaty of Rome to work towards “ever greater union” to “eliminate the barriers that divide Europe”. In Greece the central contradiction of this historical project now lies exposed. In a nutshell, this can be summarised in two questions: what if one of the “barriers that divide Europe” is the ‘winners and losers’ logic of the market, and what if the misery of some states lies directly in the fact that others are profiting from that logic?

A new dawn in Greek politics

The results of the Greek parliamentary election speak for themselves, with a dramatic collapse in support for the traditional ruling political elite. The conservative New Democracy party won 18.9 per cent of the vote – down from 33.5 per cent at the last election; Pasok, the closest thing Greece has to social democracy, won just 13.2 per cent of the vote – down from 43.9 per cent.

Since the overthrow of the military junta in 1973-74 these parties dominated Greek politics. Whatever happens in the months and years ahead, their unchallenged supremacy has momentarily been broken, opening up a chance for a radical realignment of politics. A classic polarisation between the right and left has now taken hold, with new parties formed in the cauldron of discontent emerging, while those who have for years stood on the fringes of the nation’s politics now find a hearing for their ideas amongst millions of people.

The big winners are the parties of the anti-austerity left. Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left – which unites relatively moderate eurocommunists with more radical left wing forces – made a dramatic breakthrough, forcing Pasok into third place, and winning 16.4 per cent of the vote, compared to the less that 5 per cent it won back in 2009. KKE, the Greek Communist Party – whose distinctive brand of Stalinism has traditionally combined a relatively minimal set of demands on Greece’s rulers with the style and rhetoric of ultra-left ultimatums – won 8.5 per cent of the vote, a less than 1 per cent increase on 2009.  The Democratic Left, a newly formed party that came out of Synaspismós (the largest component of Syriza) and was later joined by a split from Pasok, took 6.1 per cent of the vote. And on the far right, Independent Greece, an anti-EU conservative party took 10.6 per cent of the vote, and the neo-Nazi, hard line fascistic Golden Dawn won 7 per cent of the vote – an astonishing increase on the 0.3 per cent it won in the last elections.

Question of Euro exit now posed

There is no shortage of historical parallels, where the economic logic of debt bondage amid a global slump in output has driven a social crisis resulting in a political polarisation. It is predictable – given that so much of the ideological justification for the European Union lies in the fallout of the inter-war crisis of the last century – that Germany, 1933 has cast its dark shadow over the Greek events. Then as now, external financial obligations (“war reparations”) put unsustainable demands on an entire people, and the noble ideals of liberal internationalism enshrined at the time in the League of Nations ran up against the harsher realities of how capital distributes wealth unequally across the international system. It is perhaps telling that it is city market bloggers who appear most taken by the trauma of this historical parallel.

In response to the vote, the Greek stock market fell by 6.5 per cent – its biggest daily loss in five years – fearing that political paralysis or anti-austerity parties would now prevail. And the bond markets have now largely priced in a Greek exit, leaving the country unable to borrow privately and entirely dependent on EU bailout funds.

Under the Greek constitution the party that wins the largest share of votes automatically gains another 50 seats – a breathtakingly undemocratic measure designed to avoid the political instability of coalition rule. But even with this boost for the New Democracy, the total number of seats in parliament it has with Pasok remains two less than the 151 needed for an overall majority. With Syriza ruling out participating in a government of “national salvation”, attention then turned to whether the Democratic Left will support such a coalition. But their leader has called for a broad coalition of the centre-left parliamentary parties, i.e. one that excluded the New Democracy. But, even if Syriza agreed to participate, they would not have a workable parliamentary majority because of the electoral rule that gives an additional 50 seats to the party that has the largest share of the popular vote. With no party likely to be able to be able to meet the 151-seat threshold new elections may well be called in a months time.

The Greek political elite will ask the same question again in the hope that the possibility of an exit from the European Union is sufficient to scare the electorate into giving the “right answer” this time and grant the pro-austerity parties a workable parliamentary majority.

The run on the Athens stock market indicates that most big global investors are now working on the assumption that Greece will be forced to leave the European Union.

The ironies of history

Such is the extent to which the financial crisis of 2008 has de-stabilised the old assumptions of capitalist politics, that the once impossible suddenly appears highly probable, the Maastricht Treaty actually contained no mechanism for leaving the Eurozone and remaining within the European Union. The simple reason is that its architects believed the ideological assumptions underpinning the “globalisation” years; that ever-greater unity of liberal states would bring peace and prosperity to Europe and the world. Even if some contested these “new realities”, it didn’t really matter, because history was on the side of “Europe”.

The people of Greece exist between resistance and tragedy – and a tragedy on a historic level. But like all tragedies the course of the Eurozone crisis has no shortage of irony. It is after all Germany that has imposed a shocking level of austerity on the Greek people; a 22 per cent cut in the minimum wage; a target of 150,000 public sector job losses; 15,000 public sector workers placed on immediate “labour reserve” with wage cuts of 40 per cent and notice they would be fired within a year; 50 billion euros of privatisations; health service cuts of over 1 billion euros; 300 million in pension cuts; and the list goes on, and on. Four years of austerity has led to successive contractions in Greek GDP, i.e. a long-term and deep recession, which in turn has undermined Greece’s ability to pay. In 2011 unemployment had risen to 15 per cent, but stands at 50 per cent amongst young people. It is running a vast trade deficit and the next round of cuts will further cripple its domestic economy.

That’s why the old adage that those “who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” strikes a chord for any reader of the Greek events; for Germany more than any other state should understand the consequences of austerity on this scale. But Merkel is adamant, after the election she made clear that in her opinion “the most important thing is that the programs we agreed with Greece will be continued”. As far as the EU rulers are concerned, no matter that the electorate is rejecting austerity, they are determined to enforce it.

Neoliberalism still ascendant

Compare this austerity to the actions another hegemonic state, the United States, took in 1948 to prop up war-ravaged Europe: the Marshall Plan. The parallel is informative, because it emerged directly out of the desire to halt the march of communism by creating an economic shield around the capitalist states of Western Europe. For us it poses the question of whether capitalism has lost its ability to reform itself given that now, in our times, there appears to be an absence of a credible threat to the market system. If our age is marked by what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” – the “widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism” – then elites no longer “fear socialism” and so there is no compulsion to introduce reforms that attempt to “humanise” the market system.
Indeed, one of the remarkable things about Greece has been the preparedness of its political elite to undertake the austerity programmes in order to remain in the “European project”. Partly this expresses a political and ideological rationale. Entry into “Europe” was fundamental to the assumptions of post-1974 Greece. Konstantinos Karamanlis, the founder of modern Greece, saw entry into the common market as fundamental part of its transition to a modern and “civilised” liberal nation and successfully resided over their entry in 1981.

But partly also in Greece, like so many other states on the Eurozone periphery, a wealthy and technocratic elite have grown rich from the Eurozone project. And they as much as other big international investors stand to profit from the protection of the Greek financial sector and the dramatic “re-structuring” of its domestic economy that imposes the costs of the crisis on to its working majority. But while this nexus of economic interests groups is undoubtedly powerful, it will be the political decisions of a small layer of individuals that might prove decisive as to whether Greece will be able to remain in the European Union.

Elusive alternative?

One of the challenges for those of us that want to actually go beyond capitalism and use the social crisis to rebuild faith in the socialist alternative is how we relate to situations like Greece where a broad based rejection of the logical outcome of the project of capitalist Europe is juxtaposed to a lack of belief in a credible alternative. Most opinion polls in Greece for instance still show that a majority favour remaining in the European Union but do not want to accept the costs that have become attached to it. Although Greece was not featured in a recent global surveyon attitudes to capitalism, in Spain = which is experiencing a similar economic contraction – some 42 per cent believed “a fundamental alternative to free market capitalism was needed” – one of the highest proportions. In Greece, the biggest gain of the current electoral crisis has been Syriza, whose alternative strategy does not fundamentally reject a “capitalist answer” to the crisis and has an ambiguous position in EU membership. The much more radical alliance of the left, Antarsya, won 1.4 per cent of the vote – a dramatic increase in its previous results – but still not anything like as credible a vote.

The current crisis may be destabilising many of the old assumptions, but instilling belief in an alternative remains elusive for the radical left. In Greece the scope for compromise with the European Union that would be acceptable to Syriza exists. But to achieve it would require fundamentally uprooting the neoliberal assumptions that remain dominant within “the project of Europe”. For a start it would require completely transforming the financial and banking system into public enterprises, allowing the state to take a far wider presence within the economy per se, and, in turn, create mayhem on the global stock markets as the increased presence of the state would “squeeze out” opportunities for capital. The comparison with the conditions that surrounded the Marshall Plan in 1948 is indeed telling, because the scope for a social compromise between labour and capital existed then given the growth opportunities for capital within the war-ravaged economies of the West. But as David Harvey argues in his Brief History of Neoliberalism, it is one thing to give workers an increased share of wealth as the economy is undergoing an overall expansion, but to do it in conditions of stagnation or decline is quite another. And thus while politics undoubtedly plays a role in the unfolding events that can’t be reduced to the economic, there are nonetheless structural exigencies in contemporary capitalism that make austerity a “rational” choice.

Overcoming capitalist realism

Greece remains a special case within Europe given that it has felt austerity on a scale that no other European state has yet experienced. But the great fear is whether it is only a matter of time that other countries witness similar convulsions under the whip hand of austerity. In its own way it gives a peculiar twist, to Marx and Engels’ famous formula from Communist Manifesto that capitalism “creates a world after its own image”. The question is whether the image of Greece spreads ineluctably across Europe – either in the form of the semi-globalisation of austerity economics to Spain, Italy, et al, or if an exit from the Euro encourages others to follow suit. That’s why economically the European Union could well withstand a total Greek default and exit, but its political costs will be enormous. Even though the Union will continue with participants prepared to accept the economics of austerity, it will no longer represent an open, globalised project of liberal internationalisation, but will more come to be seen as an elitist and deeply unjust neoliberal project.

The situation in Greece is perhaps best described as what Émile Durkheim’s Suicide termed the “state of anomie” – where ties within a community are thrown into chaos as it descends on a path of breakdown, conflict and instability that it cannot escape. For Durkheim this arose from a lack of institutionalised social ethics, but in its concrete historical incarnations, most notably in inter-war Germany, it has arisen not from a lack of ethics incorporated into a liberal system of law, but from a disjuncture between this moral code and the failure of capitalism to realise the universal prosperity that it took as its raison d’être.

In situations of breakdown the opportunity for anti-capitalist transformation arises indubitably but there is no shortage of instances where far right forces have prospered too. If, however, there is a positive side to the legacy that the 20th century left behind for us today it is a popular aversion to the totalitarianism that blighted attempts at radical social change in the last century. And while we should not be complacent, we can take confidence from the fact that it will not easy for fascist forces to prosper in these circumstances, even though we must be keenly aware of how the perceived “failure of socialism” represents an enduring challenge to the socialist project. It is thus both vitally necessary to the success of our project, and equally necessary to give it any hope of gaining a mass, popular appeal, that we stress its democratic and anti-authoritarian character – that we want workers to “take hold of their own lives”. In this regard, the Greek crisis gives a powerful example of the sham character of liberal capitalist democracy; for its voters rejected austerity in 2009 and got more austerity. Now in 2012 they have rejected austerity again, but they still have a political system that rules above the people and is subject to the demands of global capital.

Here, then, a key task of the radical left must be popular agitation for fundamental anti-capitalist transition which extends democracy right down into the economic structure of our society. But it also needs to popularise a series of immediate policies that push in the direction of a break with the logic of capitalist markets. A good start is to build mass movements that are actively demanding that the international financial markets, which lent to Greece at their own risk, do not get a penny in return; to create jobs in the public sector through a punitive tax on the rich; and take into public control the vast wealth that is still concentred in their hands of small minority within the polity. But at the same time, we need to build forms of organisation, in the context of these enveloping mass movements, that show in embryo a different kind of society is possible, by democratising the workplace and building forms of political organisation that start to empower workers from below.

The only example that we have at our disposal for when workers’ successfully “took the power” in this way remains Russia, 1917, where it was soviets, democratic forms of workplace power, that provided the crucial agency for the transfer of power to working people and it was their decline and bureaucratisation that led to the revolutions’ defeat.

How to form similar bodies – that draw on the best of recent popular movements, such as the social assemblies of the Indignados but extend this form of organisation deeper into the workplaces – is a key question within Greece. This is especially so given that the deepening austerity has made developing popular control of the public sector a vital necessity simply to maintain basic social services on which workers depend. But at the same time, the ‘political question’ – of where state power lies and who it defends – needs to remain front and centre of the renewal of popular anticapitalism. In these tumultuous global times, in Greece’s deep state of anomie, and relatively recent experience of military rule, the left has to remain alert to the danger of a closing down of the democratic process entirely. This would be doubly likely if radically anticapitalist forces started to gain a wider hearing.

All these questions need to be subject to a wider ranging debate on the global left. The return of strategic left wing thinking – that has been long discussed and whose arrival was heralded at various points in the last ten years – needs to become real. The Greek crisis will change the European Union forever, but it also represents a dramatic testing ground for all radical left wing ideas that claim to offer a way out of “anomie”.

Crucially, we cannot see the Greek crisis as a “Greek affair”, but as one that affects all of us. After all, if the people of Europe are too escape the barbaric realities that the “European project” has now imposed on them and to avoid the terrors of the last century, then they we need a different kind of “European project”, one not based on capitalism, but on the principles of a democratic, working class internationalism extending across all borders.

This article was originally published on Anticapitalist Initiative

By Lisa Glass / @lisaaglass

Currently, the value of global gender equality is top of the agenda for many Western governments and organisations such as the UN. The move to empower women and girls on a global scale is obviously in itself a positive step. However, the consequences of Western interventions in the global South need to be properly considered and addressed. In certain situations, the field is opened up for corporations and others with commercial interests to exploit this heightened interest for capitalist gains.

In her talk, “Exporting Girl Power: Nike and the Girl Effect” at the Women’s Library in east London on 18 April 2012, Professor Rosalind Gill, King’s College London, discussed Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign. The powerful, rhetorical narrative of the campaign is that by educating girls in the global South, they will delay marriage, hence having fewer children, reducing the country’s population and thereby improving the overall economy of their country. The focus on the education and empowerment of young women is a positive message in itself, but at the same time this campaign homogonises and generalises women in the global South. Further, it suggests that the reason for poverty is because women in these countries are oppressed. The real causes of global poverty are clearly much more complex and multi-faceted than that. The role of colonialism and capitalism in causing and perpetuating global poverty are completely overlooked here. The Girl Effect campaign suggests that the need for feminism is displaced to the global South, and that there is no need for it in the West, and furthermore effectively excuses the West from blame for global poverty.

The motivation for Nike and organisations like it is to develop new markets in these countries, Gill suggested. By improving the economies of these countries, they create new markets for their products. Furthermore, certain campaigns such as the UN’s Girl Up encourages girls and women in the West to express their solidarity through acts of consumption by buying branded products. A real feminist solidarity, it can be argued, would operate outside of consumerism and commercialism and would work with women in their own countries, starting from their own priorities, agendas and struggles.

Another issue discussed was the “feminising” of responsibility for survival. Dr Kalpana Wilson, London School of Economics, who also spoke at the Women’s Library event, has worked extensively with women in rural labour movements. She argued that the motivations of certain organisations have little to do with gender equality and that the empowerment of women and girls, and more to do with mobilising the labour of women in the global South, in the interests of global capital. Dr Wilson considered that the promotion of gender equality is linked with broader neoliberal policies. This, she explained, means that women are expected to step in and provide a safety net from poverty by doing more work. Another example of this kind of ethos is the World Bank’s “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” Action Plan, which reconstructs women as entrepreneurs who are able to cope with and overcome poverty. The rhetoric is not about eradicating poverty but teaching the poor to take responsibility and find ways of coping with it.

The message from the session seems to be that, for true equality to be established, it must be contextualised within every country and understood for itself. It cannot be imposed in broad strokes from the outside. Western governments’ and other organisations’ attempts to impose gender equality on the global South is not only misguided but a consequence of the capitalist politics that dominate the Western world.

Lisa Glass is a London-based feminist writer and editor.

By Koos Couvée

Days after it emerged that the organisation responsible for investigating police misconduct are unable to interview police officers who were involved in the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham last year, campaigners are calling for the abolition of the Independent Police Complaints Comission (IPCC) and for a proper, citizen-led organisation to replace it.

Over a hundred people, including family members of those who lost their lives at hand of the police, rallied at the IPCC’s headqurters in Holborn, central London, yesterday. The May Day protest was held under the slogan ‘Abolish the IPCC’ and groups involved called for a full and public parliamentary enquiry into the IPCC and the wider police complaints system (see flyer at the bottom of this post).

Michael Doherty, of the Campaign 4 Justice, is privately prosecuting the Metropolitan Police for perverting the course of justice.  Doherty wrote in a press release last week:

“Whilst it is clear that a system for police accountability is vital and required in law, the current conduct of the IPCC falls far short of what we should reasonably expect. There is mass dissatisfaction from those people who have turned to the IPCC for help and complaint outcomes are of serious concern. Our view is that it appears both misconduct of the police and their criminal behaviour is regularly covered up.

“It is not our demand that justice requires the malicious prosecution of police officers on non-existent grounds, but that the same standards of law are applied universally to all and sundry, without exception.”

Most recent controversies involving the IPCC centre on the Mark Duggan case, whose death triggered the riots that rocked England last summer. Eight months after Duggan was shot dead by police, there is continuing uncertainty about why he was shot and in which circumstances.

Community distrust of the IPCC started immediately after the shooting, as the watchdog’s initial statement on Duggan’s death included the falsehood that he had shot at police first, and that Scotland Yard marksmen at the scene had acted in self-defence. When this turned out to be untrue, the IPCC apologised over what many in Tottenham regarded as a blatant lie.

Eight months after Duggan’s death, the police officers involved have provided short, written statements, but none has been interviewed. This is highly controversial since there are doubts about the ways in which the IPCC handled several key bits of evidence, particularly why the minicab in which Duggan was travelling was removed from the scene by the IPCC, only to be returned later, and why the gun alleged to be Duggan’s was found 14 feet away from the scene, on the other side of a fence. Police had stopped Duggan in Ferry Lane, between Tottenham and Walthamstow, an area without active CCTV cameras.

The IPCC only has the power to summon police officers when they suspect the officers in question of having committed a crime. In the Duggan case, the IPCC seems to have been extremely reluctant to consider this option.  Last week, Tottenham community activist and race relations consultant Stafford Scott called for the IPCC to be given full powers to investigate the shooting.

Scott, co-founder of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign, had resigned in November of last year from the community reference group set up by the IPCC to ensure local confidence in the investigation. He quit over the IPCC’s handling of key bits of evidence, branding the investigation ‘shoddy’. It appeared that Scott no longer had any confidence in the investigation, and was compromising his position as community leader by being involved in it.

In March of this year, the Duggan family heard that the earliest date for an inquest would be January 2013, but was also told that an inquest may never take place. A special inquiry may be held instead, as the IPCC are unable to disclose intelligence obtained by the police through phone-tapping under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA). It means that crucial part of the inquiry may have to be held behind closed doors, leaving Duggan’s family to guess about the police intelligence that led to his death.

Stafford Scott said in a recent BBC Radio 4 report on the Duggan case:

“It’s absolute double standards. Why is the law different for police officers? Yes we need to protect those who protect us. But we have to protect them to maintain the law. This is crazyness.”

Other cases where families are still in the dark over what happened to their loved one, or are unhappy about the outcome of the IPCC investigation, are those of Azelle Rodney, Sean Rigg, Jean Charles de Menezes, Smiley Culture, Dimitri Fraser, Sean Rigg and many, many others.

The key word in the IPCC’s title, distinguishing it from its predecessor, the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), is ‘independent’. But most staff members are ex-police officers and the outcomes of its enquiries into deaths in custody have not led to a single prosecution, even in cases where there has been strong evidence against officers involved. Raju Bhatt, a lawyer who has specialised over more than two decades in private and public law claims as well as inquests into deaths in custody, said in the same BBC report:

“There seems to be a failure of confidence and courage. It seems to be a tendency to allow the police service and their associations to dominate their thinking.”

uffc-campaigncentral.net

Campaign 4 Justice 4 Smiley Culture

4wardeveruk.org

www.injusticefilm.co.uk

By Gavan Titley

Mohamed Merah was still under police siege when the email came from a researcher on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show; ‘are you free to come on and discuss the massacre in Toulouse, and whether this could ever happen in Britain?’ The answer was no, but the question, and the invitation, interested me. Why would a London radio show ask a little-known Ireland-based researcher on to talk about events in France, and the ‘lessons’ of those killings?

I can’t speak for the LBC researcher’s rationale, of course, but given that this wasn’t the first time this had happened, I have a theory. In the immediate aftermath of the London riots, a Dublin radio talk show invited me to discuss the riots and ‘what this says about multiculturalism’ (again, the answer was no, but after a friend argued with me that this simply vacated the space to oppose, however briefly, the bundle of racialized assumptions bound up in the question, I thought about accepting. To aid this possible change of mind I turned on the radio, just in time to hear the presenter of the show say ‘after the break we’ll be talking about the London riots and we’ll be asking, does this suggest that Enoch Powell had a point…’).

My theory isn’t very sophisticated, but then again, I don’t think it needs to be. Any story of violence or social conflict involving ‘migrants’ and ethnic minorities not only invites unthinking and opportunistic reductionism – they must have caused it somehow, because they’re like that – it also invites the rehearsal of a version of what Ghassan Hage terms ‘white governmental buzz’:

“Immigration debates and opinion polls are an invitation to judge those who have already immigrated, as well as those who are about to immigrate. Not only is this facilitated through the use of the word ‘migrant’, whose meaning slides freely between the two categories, but also, and inescapably, to pronounce a judgement on the value of migration is to pronounce a judgement on the value of the contribution of existing Third- World looking Australians to the country’s development. It is in the conditions created by all these discursive effects that a White immigration speak flourishes – a language operating in itself as a technology of problematisation and marginalisation: ‘they should come’, and ‘they shouldn’t’, ‘they have contributed’ and ‘they haven’t’, ‘there are too many’ and ‘there aren’t enough’ [...] it is on such fertile ground that the White Nation fantasy seasonally rejuvenates itself and tried to keep the multicultural real at bay. In this sense, the immigration debate became the main form in which the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion was ritualised and institutionalised in Australia.“

(White Nation 1998: 242)

In these instances, the governmental buzz is extended by the transnational evidence of the problem. Not only are ‘they’ to blame but ‘we’ need to be honest – we are really to blame for letting it get this far. The ‘it’, of course, is multiculturalism, hence my hypothesis for these media requests: researcher needs a news frame, fast, for foreign event involving dis-integrating minorities. Googles ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ or some such formulation. Email the name that pops up. Location and expertise don’t matter, as multiculturalism is inherently problematic, as are ‘they’, wherever they may be found. Therefore come, talk about Toulouse, talk about London, talk about the price we’re paying and the necessity of correction.

The first invitation of this kind made its way to me a few days after the July 22 killings in Norway. Journalist: ‘does your book predict what happened in Norway?’ Again, I can only surmise, but this seemed to be informed by the same set of assumptions, but in this instance amplified by the intensive ideological labour, in the aftermath of the killings, to find ways of denouncing Anders Breivik while imbuing his ideological justification with explanatory significance.

The framework of the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ is powerful because it allows for opportunistic ideological work: as The Jerusalem Post editorial argued at the time,  ”Oslo’s devastating tragedy should not be allowed to be manipulated by those who would cover up the abject failure of multiculturalism”. But as the other examples suggest, its power also derives from its status as a kind of transnational common sense, which makes it a useful news frame in the context of non-stop news-making about places, societies and contexts that journalists may know little about.

It is in response to this that I wrote two blog pieces last week that The Multicultural Politic wished to re-post here. The first, on Irish Left Review, takes a look at some of the opportunism that has accompanied the first two weeks of Breivik’s trial in Oslo. The second, on Counterfire, examines the rush to extract ‘lessons’ from the trial.

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Gavan Titley is lecturer in media studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and co-author of The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (Zed, 2011)

Prime Minister’s Questions this week takes place while Rupert Murdoch gives testimony at the Leveson Inquiry and also the news that the UK is back in recession. This is our take on what happened:

Henderson (Con): After Afghanistan exit are we leaving trainers on how to pull fingernails?
PM: It is paramount that the Afghans learn this

Ed M: I love the army. Double Dip recession, terrible…for you! Blame it on boogie?
PM: It’s your fault, we need more privatisation.

Ed M: You created this recession. Own this shitbag you created.
PM: None of my business mates think it was my fault. So must be yours.

Ed M: Arrogant fucks. Hasn’t Hunt resigned yet?
PM: Err..Stick to the economy! Leveson says wait for his judgment.

Ed M: Leveson doesn’t run your government. Dump Hunt he’s bent.
PM: But you love this inquiry, shut up & stop being a media whore.

Ed M: Pathetic. Hunt lied to the Commons! Sack the shit.
PM: I believe Hunt is an excellent human shield. He is great.

Ed M: Your government is sprayed in sleazy mucus.
PM: I know there is corruption but it has been going on for ages.

McCartney (Con): My patch has got an economic recovery! Come and see yourself! May I remove my nose from your backside?
PM: You may.

Qureshi (Lab): Is your economic policy a load of bollocks?
PM: Look at the size of the recession Labour caused. Its clear its your fault.

Birtwhistle (LD): We need more apprenticeships, will you keep it up?
PM: Yup

Mahmood: You said cutting expenditure in a recession
PM: We cut deficits by cutting economic activity

Lefroy (Con): Malaria is a serious problem. The children of the world thank you.
PM: I’m proud that they can do that.

Lab MP: So out of the danger zone are we?
PM: Look be grateful that we are not Greece. Look low interest rates!

Whittaker (Con): Rich schools are happy they are getting government cash.
PM: We are looking after our own.

McKenzie: Nadine Dorries was right about you wasn’t she?
PM: I agree with her.

Jones: A business in my patch is doing well? What recession?
PM: That’s the spirit!

Simpson (DUP): Help the drivers in my patch, cut fuel taxes!
PM: Thanks to union bureaucrats, strikes have been delayed.

Amess (Con): My mum is turning 100. She loves the Olympics.
PM: Brilliant, she’ll be faster than bolt so I can repeat an old gag.

Scot MP: Salmond was a lobbyist for Rupert Murdoch, wasn’t he a scumbag?
PM: Come off it, we’ve all kneeled before his organ.

Griffiths: Too many council are paying staff over £100K
PM: Yup some Labour Council is still refusing to show their figures.

Blackman (Con): Ken is an artful tax dodger.
PM: Ken needs to show all the businesses tax receipts. Sugar was right about Ken.

Cunningham: Drop regional pay programmes and improve our schools.
PM: Glad you support the money I’m putting in schools.

Lloyd (LD): The rich only want to give money to dodge tax, aren’t they all fuckers?
PM: We want to encourage the rich.

Lab MP: Sack the Cunt!
PM: Look, forget that I’m privatising the welfare state to make Britain better.

Hammond (Con): We’re in a debt crisis, we can’t spend more money!
PM: We are being cheerled on by the rich, we’re doing the right thing!

Winnick: Same old Tories. Destroying our economy. Always in sleaze.
PM: Russell Brand was right to call you a shit.

As heard by @justinthelibsoc

By Koos Couvée

The NUJ is back at News International headquarters in Wapping, more than twenty-five years after being derecognised and locked out during the Wapping strike of 1896.

A newly created NUJ (National Union of Journalists) chapel is seeking legal action against parent company News Corporation after a large stack of documentation from Sun reporters was handed over to the police as part of an investigation into corrupt payments, The Journalist, the NUJ magazine reported last week.

The journalists fear that the documents, which include confidential emails, articles and transcripts of internal meetings, will identify legitimate sources to the police and may lead to whistleblowers being identified.

As a response to what the journalists see as an attack on professional standards and press freedom, the chapel are seeking an injunction against parent company News Corporation to stop its Management and Standards Committee (MSC) from passing on any further information.

Three Times reporters, who have been in contact with colleagues at the Sun, have agreed to be named on the injunction, and a meeting of all NUJ members at News International is being planned, the NUJ publication reports.

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet wrote in the same issue that the union had been flooded with calls from sources who had passed on information to News International journalists, fearing arrest and losing their jobs.

Stanistreet said: “If you had to think of the one overriding responsibility of any journalist – a core principle enshrined in the NUJ’s Code of Conduct – it would be the protection of sources. It’s a vital aspect of a free press – that whistleblowers and sources need to be able to come forward and share information they believe the public should know about, in the certain knowledge that their identifies will be protected.

“The union has a long record of defending members from having to identify their sources.  It was an NUJ-backed case that fixed the journalists’ “right to silence” in European law. In 1996 Bill Goodwin, a young reporter on a business magazine, The Engineer, won a landmark case against the UK government at the European Court of Human Rights.”

The MSC had been set up by News Corp to ensure cooperation with investigations into phone hacking and corrupt payments in the wake of the scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World in July last year.

Journalists at News International are represented by the management-backed News International Staff Association (NISA). In February, Stanistreet wrote on the blog of Neville Thurlbeck, former news editor at the News of the World, that NISA was “set up by Murdoch as a union-busting move to legally block the NUJ from seeking recognition” and that “the organisation is not capable of providing journalists with independent representation and genuine protection.”

NISA was created during the Wapping dispute of 1986, when Murdoch sacked 6,000 workers and withdrew workers’ recognition from their unions in a move from Fleet Street to Wapping. The dispute is widely regarded as turning point in the history of British trade unionism and industrial relations.

The crushing of the unions also allowed Murdoch to fundamentally reform editorial management and further what he called a ‘cultural revolution’ against the British establishment. Murdoch evidently did not succeed in altering Britain’s power structure, but, as east London-based community centre worker and campaigner Kevin Blowe writes on his blog, Random Blowe:

“The other legacies of the [Wapping] strike have become clear: removing trade unions from Wapping gave Rupert Murdoch the absolute power to ensure that his journalists did whatever was necessary in the pursuit of greater profit – even when, as we’ve seen with the phone hacking scandal, the methods used were illegal. It also cemented a cosy and corrupting relationship between News International, the government and the Metropolitan Police that has continued for 25 years, one that only now is the Leveson Inquiry beginning to pick apart.”

Since the start of Operation Elveden, the Met’s investigation into corrupt payments to police officers and public officials, 12 current and former Sun journalists have been arrested.

Next week, the NUJ will be representing Jason Parkinson, a member and video journalist together with BBC, ITN, BskyB and Hardcash Productions seeking a judicial review of a court decision, forcing journalists, media organisations and broadcasters to hand over footage taken during the disturbances at Dale Farm, when travellers were evicted from their site by the council.

Today, 33 years after his death at the hands of the police during an anti-nazi demonstration in Southall, west London, we commemorate New-Zealand born teacher Clement Blair Peach.

Blair Peach, anti-racist activist and president of the East London NUT branch was struck by a police baton during a demonstration against the decision of the far-right National Front to hold an election meeting in the neighbourhood during the 1979 general election.

Blair Peach died in Ealing hospital a day later. No police officer has ever been charged with his death.

Read more the case here and this account by Peach’s friend Nick Grant on how the tragedy unfolded.

Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote a song about Peach’s death entitled ‘Reggae fi Peach’, released on the album Bass Culture (1980).

Little Black Sambo: Innocent times?

By Mhairi McAlpine / @Mhairi_McAlpine

Growing up in the 1970s, I didn’t have the most politically correct upbringing. A gollywog adorned the jam jar I stared blankly at as I woke up over my morning toast, in school we read “Little Black Sambo” – complete with illustrations, for pleasure I read about how evil Gollywogs were, courtesy of Enid Blyton, and watched the Black and White Minstral show in the evening. I am familiar with the “blackface”, it was the only depiction I had of Black people until I was around ten years old, when a new depiction of emaciated Ethiopians became their main representation. Those days are thankfully long gone, we thought, with Blackface relegated to the mists of history, but a Swedish artist has staged a revival.

He created an installation of a cake made in the form of a “blackface” naked woman, and invited various worthies to slice off sections of the genital area while he crouched under the table it lay on, poking his head through into the hollow section of the head and “screaming” as it was cut, proportedly as a means of highlighting the dangers of genital cutting. The whole thing was so repulsively racist that I and many others could only watch slack jawed as the Swedish minister for culture and other wealthy powerful white women took great delight in plunging the knife into the area designed to represent the genitals, scooping out the dark pink flesh, laughing as they cannibalised the body, while listening to screams eminating from the mouth. As Jondera Smith points out though on the Crunk Collective, perhaps it does function as a work of art – just not the one the artist intended. As installation art it is one of the most reactionary things I have seen in a long time; as performance art it is exemplary. Watching white western women callously use the black body as a canvas with which to display their progressive credentials, performing as saviours and liberators ignorant to their role as the agents of the black woman’s marginalisation and destruction.

Western opposition to ritual genital cutting has a history rooted in colonialism. Victorian physicians in England justified the practice for women with learning difficulties, as a means to end extra-marital sexual activity and masturbation at the same time as Christian missionaries in Africa campaigned against the practice. The reasons for its continuance today are complex. In societies where women are valued for their reproductive abilities, can command a “bride-price” and paternal lineage is held in high regard, the practice is valued as upholding tribal values. Uncut women can be ostracised by both their age mates and potential suitors, condemning them to a life of poverty in societies where the primary means of female sustenance is through marriage. Many Western charities and campaigners have highlighted the damaging nature of these procedures, particularly in countries where health and midwifery care are minimal or non-existant, yet still the practice continues, and will continue to do so as long as women are valued for their ability to bear the children of men.

Genital cutting is not only practised in Africa. Although illegal in the Scotland there are a number of clinics offering cosmetic surgery which falls foul of the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Act. As someone who has electively undergone a procedure which is also illegal under that law (classifed as Type IV FGM by the WHO), my feelings on it’s wide ranging scope are mixed. I have no regrets about my choice, it was not coerced and had no external pressure to undergo it, a situation which does not hold true for many women, particularly the young women and girls who are the subject of much of the most dangerous implementations of such surgery. These frequently involve the removal of the prepuce, clitoris, labia and on occasions the sealing of the vaginal opening, leading to a loss of sensation, infection and pain on both intercourse and childbirth.

While the above law gives a strong message that that Scotland will not condone such surgery, it is less supportive to its survivors and potential victims. Last year the UK government implimented an opt-out for an EU directive which recognises that women may seek asylum on the grounds of gender based persecution. One form that persecution takes is genital cutting against the wishes of the young woman, girl or her mother. Women, seeing the damage that it has done to older women flee their communities to avoid the same fate happening to them or their daughters, seeking a country in which women’s bodily autonomy is respected. While the UK protects its own citizens in this respect, its compassion to the refugees it creates is limited. Babies at risk of severe mutilation have been sent back with their parents to an uncertain future.

The liberation of Black women must come from Black women. Black women who recognise both the racialised and gendered nature of the provision of resources and committed to ending the power structure which supports it. White women laughing as they consume a Black female body controlled by a Black man does nothing except demonstrate that we have a long way to go.

Lord Rothermere (then owner of the Daily Mail) and Adolf Hitler

It seems The Daily Mail are unable to kick the habit of supporting fascists… from the paper that brought you “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” in 1930s are now advocating Marine Le Pen in 2012.

Marine Le Pen remains, among an imperfect choice in urgent times, the only candidate capable of saving France’s control over her finances, borders, and identity.

She is the only candidate available to conservative voters advancing the case for an exit from the Euro, the one measure which if executed carefully might yet save France from being swamped by foreign debts amassed elsewhere in a European project largely of its own making.

While Nicholas Sarkozy raises the prospect of securing French borders through withdrawal from the Schengen area, she possesses the requisite disdain for European entanglements which he all too comprehensively does not. Her defence of French national identity in the country with Europe’s most numerous Muslim minority is credible, whereas Sarkozy’s betrays his increasingly impotent opportunism.

France next elects a president to the Élysée Palace in 2017. The most urgent question in this election ought to have been whether the next will matter much. There is no good reason as things stand to believe that France will escape the impotent slide into the morass of multiculturalism and bankrupt late European social democracy.

Richard Waghorne has form as he wrote a similar article praising Le Pen earlier this year: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2087042/French-downgrade-shows-Marine-Le-Pens-role-French-public-life-just-legitimate-increasingly-necessary.html

Is it me or does his language slightly reminiscent of Breivik’s manifesto?