Feel No Shame - Call Bigots What They Are: Bigoted

This election campaign seems to be moving into the realms of the surreal.  Some mornings I wake up and think I am in 1906 or at least 1922 with the election seeming to be about the Liberals versus the Conservatives with this marginal party, Labour, attracting minimal interest.  It is a fantasy, of course.  I agree the Liberal Democrats represent a progressive voice and I support a number of their policies, but, as I have noted before, even with a 6% swing to them against both Labour and the Conservatives they will at most receive ten or twenty new seats.  Yes, they may hold a balance in a hung parliament, but Nick Clegg as prime minister is only going to happen in some alternate reality, not this one.  Much of the media, want us to think something very different.  Even 'The Guardian' has defected from supporting Labour to backing the Liberal Democrats and in sharp contrast to 1997 no newspaper now supports Labour.  Of course, this is not surprising.  Newspapers have not, in reality, supported the Labour Party since the 1970s.  What they backed in 1997 was the Christian Democrat Blair Party.  Brown's problem is actually to bring the Labour Party back to being the Labour Party and there is no support among the elites for that and there has not been since the era of the Thatcherite/Washington consensus came into British politics from 1974/9 onwards.

More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties.  For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign.  However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him.  Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter.  She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK.  This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work.  Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'.  In this he has suffered many politicians.  US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984:  'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.'  President George Bush made many such gaffes.  Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.

Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted.  I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation.  Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather.  This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies.  Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements.  When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing.  The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities.  The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British.  Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded.  Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed.  I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status.  We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates.  I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk.  There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.

Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state.  This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits.  It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs.  What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us.  In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.

If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it.  Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them.  Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen.  The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society.  As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.

I was proud of Gordon Brown this week.  When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.

The 'They're So Privileged' Brand of Racism

People often say that the British, in contrast to our European neighbours, are reluctant to talk about politics.  However, in my experience there is one type of politics they seem to have no embarrassment in sounding off about and that is racist politics.  Anyone who travels in a taxi knows that within a matter of moments of the car starting you will be subjected to a string of racist comments that sound they come straight from the BNP manifesto.  Ninety percent of taxi drivers, men and women, seem compelled to outline their racist views.  Even the black comedian Lenny Henry has commented on this, noting the exception that they make for him 'well, of course, Lenny, I'm not talking about people like you' as if that permits them to continue with their diatribe.

I encountered this phenomenon last night not in a taxi but when I was waiting to pay for a meal.  The man, probably in his fifities, who was in front of me was contesting his bill.  He was correct that it had been added up wrongly, it turned out he had worked as a croupier so was skilled at mental arithmetic, more skilled than the restaurant staff were at punching numbers into a calculator.  Perhaps it was his victory which seemed to save him £5 that meant he was bullish at outlining his racist views to anyone in earshot, with me, being behind him in the queue, being the prime target.  Of course, he made no attempt to assess if I was open to his lecture, because like so many bigots he assumed that what he was saying was 'common sense' and so could not be challenged and must be accepted by any sane person.  His statements reminded me of a brand of racism that I have often encountered down the years but had simply lumped together with the other forms.

You will often come across people who have the conviction that certain sectors of society are getting privileges that the rest of us cannot access.  The target is usually lone parents, asylum seekers and/or immigrants.  They believe that these people are getting easy access to social welfare payments which exceed the norm and that they can jump the queue in terms of housing and other provision.  To force home this point they emphasise how undeserving the people are, usually they are portrayed as a combination of 'not wanting' to work, being feckless, creating children simply to gain financial benefits, unable to speak English, quite often criminal and these days, probably associated with extremist or terrorist activities.  The speaker feels that in line with the sense of deserving/undeserving poor, that such people are on the undeserving side.  They have no knowledge of how low benefit payments are to anyone, how difficult it is for new arrivers in the UK to claim anything and the poor quality of a lot of accommodation councils are compelled to house people in.

The sting in this type of racism is that it not only attacks the individuals themselves, who are often, though not always, from a different ethnic group from the speaker, but also some faceless bureaucracy that for some reason delights in awarding these bounteous gifts to the people the speaker despises.  There is no sense that somehow the civil service or councils have been penetrated by the agents of foreign powers, just a simple assumption that people in such roles have a desire to privilege lone parents and people born abroad or even just British people of non-Caucasian ethnicity.  I have worked in different branches of the civil service, and while most civil servants are not racist (though some I have known clearly are), neither do they have a desire to privilege any social or ethnic group.  Even if they did, there are very strict rules about what can be given to anyone and the application process for housing or benefits is very lengthy, complex and thorough.  No benefits are simply dished out, despite the assumption that racist speakers make.  In fact if English is not your first language, it is incredibly hard to navigate your way through all the forms you have to complete to get any benefits.

This assumption, often fostered by tabloid newspapers, that the despised groups in society are in fact the privileged ones not only gives a point on which to bash these groups but also to attack the ordinary people who administer the UK's civil service and council services, who, as it is, often come in for verbal and even physicl attack while trying to do such work.  No wonder it is so difficult to recruit social workers when they are accused either of not intervening soon enough when a child or woman dies or, in fact, more commonly, 'sticking their noses in' when people, particularly men, want to run their families in a harsh, often abusive, way.  They do a tough job but simply come constantly under fire for whatever they do.  Of course, the people making such allegations never would even consider taking a job like that.  Their assumptions are that, there will always be people willing to step forward to do such hard work, though, of course, they will be doing it wrongly and privileging the 'wrong' people.  It is all too easy to leave it to the state to pick up the pieces from the distorted society and economy caused by thirty years of Thatcherite policies while still whining on constantly about how poorly or incorrectly they are doing it.

The man in front of me had worked in the Bahamas and this allowed him to add an extra layer to the complaints he was making to anyone who would listen.  He whined that in the UK that black people, as a minority, are privileged, even though 48% of black males aged 16-24, 31% of Asian males of this age group and 20% of white males at that age are unemployed; a fifth of black men of all ages are unemployed, so who is being privileged?  Institutional racism still makes an impact on getting a job.  In the Bahamas, 85% of the population is black, 12% white and 3% Hispanic (which I tend to include in white anyway, but is separated out in the USA), whereas in the UK the population is 92% white, only 2% is black, the remaining 6% being Asian, mixed race or other ethnicities.  So, on the basis of this man's assumptions, white people should be as privileged in the Bahamas as he believes black people are in the UK.  Of course, he did not find that to be the case, and so was angry.  It did not lead him to re-assess his 'common sense' assumption that actually in all countries ethnic minorities tend to be disadvantaged it simply led him to assume that there is a conspiracy straddling different countries to put white people at a disadvantage.  He did not delight in the fact that he could move back and forth between countries and had always been in work and was clearly wealthy enough to take twenty people to dinner, even if just in a chain restaurant.  He had found a basis to whine about how unfairly treated he had been.

As the man's racism began to move into an area which in my experience is uncommon even in public diatribes of such people, I simply walked away.  He had got into full stride arguing that as the Bahamas were once a British colony (self-governing since 1964; independent from 1973) and still has the British Queen as its monarch, then the whites should be in control.  His views that they would do a better, fairer job belong in the 19th century, though even then they were wrong.  It is interesting to find someone who subscribes to the 'white man's burden' view of the current world.  I imagine if I had stayed around long enough I would hear how the white man is so much more superior to other races, though this falls down even on the man's own assumptions, because in his world view, black people are extremely clever and assertive in getting benefits that he feels they are not entitled to and do not 'deserve'.  It is alarming that such views are not only held in 21st century Britain but that you run the risk of being bombarded with them when you are simply out for a quiet meal, my first in a restaurant for five months.  I increasingly despair, but see a real need to challenge these toxic assumptions and stop people thinking that such bigotry and hatred is 'common sense' that no-one could rationally question.