alternative Mayoral candidates #2

This is the rather sexy Matt O’Connor, candidate for the English Democrats. To me he looks less like a prospective mayor and more like a camp funky house DJ from Essex – the kind you see on the CDJs down your local Illusions Nitespot. What is not so clear in this photo but is more obvious in the printed election materials is that he’s actually sporting some rather fetching blonde highlights.

Nevertheless, despite his slightly gay appearance, Matty is no lightweight campaigner. According to his website he is a “Designer, Author, Social Entrepreneur and Political Campaigner,” and the “founding father” of Fathers for justice (how many grandchildren does that give him?).

O’Connor’s election video is actually pretty stylish, at least compared to the Christian effort below. Despite his Jonathan Ross-esque vocal affectations, fast edits, chiaroscuro lighting and a prominent soundtrack give a cinematic glamour and urgency to his political rhetoric.

And what rhetoric it is, in perhaps the most derogatory, sophistical sense. He claims to remember England as it used to be, “a green and pleasant land where children were safe; a country that gave the world the English language, democracy and the Magna Carta.” Mr O’Connor has a long memory, Magna Carta was issued in 1215. One also wonders where else in the world he thinks the English language could have possible come from.

Matt actually has some interesting things to say about surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties. He sees these as running counter to English notions of liberty and individual human rights. Unfortunately pegging such issues to ignorant nationalism does little to state their case. People like O’Connor discredit the libertarian movement.

Matt also has a massive chip on his shoulder about Scottish devolution, claiming that English voters subsidise cushty social policies north of the border. If what he says is true, this is another interesting area for debate. But O’Connor’s simplistic nationalism again mars the discussion, he spends more than half the video – remember, a party election broadcast for the London elections – whinging about the issue. Some of his campaign imagery verges on racism, according to fellow blogger ourkingdom.

It is difficult to see how the English democrats could position themselves as viable candidates in a city so multicultural as London. I am mixed race, while I’m happy to call myself British I would hesitate to call myself English, which I see more as an ethnic group. English branded things simply don’t have any appeal to me. Some 30% of Londoners are drawn from ethnic minority groups; what these people want is a candidate that promotes unity, rather than division. Matt O’Connor may have tasted fame with Fathers for Justice, he’s unlikely to with the English Democrats.

Filed under: London Mayor, Uncategorized , english nationalism, fathers for justice, London, London Mayor, politics

alternative Mayoral candidates #1

This is Alan Craig, councillor for Newham and candidate for The Christian Choice, a joint political venture from the Christian Peoples Alliance and the Christian Party. Frightening…

Alan promises to promote marriage and stable families as a long term solution to youth crime, educational underachievement and poverty. He also seems quite opposed to the construction of a so called ‘mega-mosque’ in West Ham that I’d never actually heard of.

According to Alan it is a terrible scandal. His Youtube video accuses the backers, an Islamic group called Tablighi Jamaat, of various seditious and treacherous activities, such as printing glossy pr brochures and failing to observe council planning laws.

He shows himself up as a bigot early on with his hasty translation of ‘jihad’ as ‘military service’. A quick Wikipedia search showed it to mean something more like ’struggle’ or ’striving’. In modern standard Arabic, the entry continues, jihad is one of the correct terms for a struggle for any cause, violent or not, religious or secular. The same terminology is applied to women’s liberation movements in the Arab world.

Like most UK Christians, Alan has all the presence of a cardboard cut out, and the rhetorical skills to match. In his party election broadcast he laments the “enormous sense of distrust that pervades

London” and attacks as its cause what he calls the “aggressive secularisation” of our political leaders and a market driven culture of greed. I don’t where he’s been for the last 10 years, but the sanctimonious Christian prattlings of Tony Blair, George Bush et al seem to have passed him by.

Alan seeks answers in the Bible, that well known handbook of town planning and local government administration. “It’s all about care,” he says, “Combatting poverty, respect for the elderly and unborn alike.” The spectre of London women having to go to Watford for an abortion looms…

Alan is big on Christian values and restoring traditional notions of family. To that effect he backs the work of churches in the community and generously promises £1000 to every couple getting married in the capital. In fact, it seems Alan sees these two policies as the answer to all of London’s ills. He has nothing to say on important areas like transport and policing, which have occupied the mainstream candidates.

I’ve never trusted Christians. To me they seem the most two faced of all religions: likely to burn you at the stake or torture you to death while harping on about forgiveness, brotherly love and the welfare of your eternal soul. At least with Al Qaeda you know where you stand. Like Al Qaeda, Alan Craig’s candidacy for Mayor is part of a worrying global trend towards religious tribalism. Politics should always be a secular enterprise, as personal religious beliefs are a matter of personal conscience. By allowing religious rhetoric into political discourse we risk going further down the road of a state that intervenes in the personal lives of citizens for their “own good.”

So far, UK Christians have not managed to attain the rhetorical skill and strong grass roots organisation of the Christian Right in the USA, so we have little to fear from them immediately. But their message is gaining ground in the British political discourse. Our political leaders are increasingly pious: Gordon Brown’s puritan injunction against supercasinos and increased taxes on alcohol are just the latest examples of the state’s attempts to save us fom our own vices.

Luckily, Alan is unlikely to win; but he is a sign that secularists need to stay on their toes.

Filed under: London, London Mayor , atheism, christians, islam, London, London Mayor, politics

Britain – shit place to be poor

Think tank Reform have published a condemnatory report showing up UK society as the most unequal and least least socially mobile of all Western developed nations.

[Live here? You're unlikely to escape...]

According to the report, despite the successes of the UK economy over the last 30 years, we have merely gone from being the ’sick man’ to the ‘divided society’ of Europe. Not very catchy, but then they are academics.

The report certainly makes depressing reading: inequality is up; child poverty is up; and severe poverty is up. At the same time income growth has accelerated for the richest 10%. The share of total income for these top 10% is apparently now at comparable levels to the 1940s, which rather mocks the idea of progress to a fairer society.

Life chances, they say, are increasingly determined by background rather than aptitude, citing studies that argue that kids from wealthy backgrounds consistently outperform kids from poorer backgrounds. This is a result of an unfair two-tier education system, which means the children of the richest get the best start in life.

I was 16 at the millennium, and the report says surprisingly little about my generation. However, it has always been clear to me that British society is deeply divided. Here in London the inequalities are stark, as anarchic town planning puts leafy suburban idylls right next to the kinds of places where you put your ipod away and hope your phone doesn’t ring. Class divisions extend right down to choice on public transport: poor people ride the bus while rich people ride the obscenely expensive Tube.

One of the biggest lies ever propagated by this Labour government was that “we’re all middle class now.” In reality we’ve all been ground into various rough gradations of proletariat, in the most Marxist sense of the word. British society is at its most divided for 60 years, and inflation continues to push up prices faster than employers are willing to raise wages, making life even harder for the poorest. This has resulted in record profits for corporations, while the average person is struggling to make ends meet.

Thatcher’s dismantling of the post war economic consensus, continued by succeeding Conservative and Labour governments, sent the UK economy into overdrive; but it also took away a significant safety net for the most disadvantaged. Privatisation destroyed key industries that had provided lower class employment as the lifting of exchange controls turned London into a Mecca for finance. The British economy lost its manufacturing base in favour of financial services, which gave greater rewards to fewer workers. The government happily trotted out GDP and growth statistics citing them as evidence of a wildly successful economy, when really it just meant that the rich were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Few of the economic gains of the various booms since the 1980s have trickled down to the population at large in the UK, even with the supposedly more redistributive Labour party at the helm. Indeed, since gaining power in 1997, this Labour administration has done much to dismantle the mechanisms for social mobility, like introducing top up fees and abolishing assisted places to public schools. At the same time, educational standards in state run education have dropped as a result of thoughtless centralisation, a culture of league tables and an obsession with assessment by examination. No matter how much money they pump into the system, it seems to become more dysfunctional with each passing year.

And that money has to come from somewhere. According to Treasury estimates the tax burden is set to rise from 34.9% of GDP in 2003-4 to 37.5% in 2011-12. But these increases in public revenue will not come from taxing our rich multinational companies and non-domiciled residents. Instead, as the recent furore over the abolition of the 10p tax rate has shown, Labour have continually increased the tax burden on the poorest sections of society, while giving away massive tax breaks to the richest, for whom the UK is an effective tax-haven.

What’s clear is that this massive scale exploitation of UK society is likely to continue as long as people remain convinced that it doesn’t affect them. This is the true lie behind the claim that we are all middle class. Your average Joe thinks that because he’s got a crippling mortgage for some 1 bedroom hovel in Hackney and he wears a suit for work that he is somehow middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are all working class now.

Spot the difference

Filed under: politics , Labour, news, politics, poverty, UK

police cadets?

Yesterday Mayor Ken published his manifesto for re-election. As the Evening Standard spun it, his policies were unmistakeably focused on young people. As a fairly young person myself I don’t entirely disapprove. However, whilst some of his ideas were reasonable, like giving students reduced rates on public transport, his policy of rolling out a scheme for metropolitan police cadets in high schools across the capital is just crazy.

Just picture it. Schoolchildren across the capital donning police uniforms, eschewing the traditional after school splif to take part in law enforcement related after school activities and learning all about the traditions of our fine constabulary. Surely not.

Embarassingly, I was once involved in a similar scheme. In my early teens I had a scholarship to a rather posh London public school. There they operated a detachment of what was called The Combined Cadet Force, an afterschool club where little toffs could play at being a member of the armed forces. I was, to my shame, an army cadet. I still have the jacket.

We used to shoot guns, run around in forests at night, get shouted at by sixth-form “officers”, eat army rations that made you constipated, all kinds of fun shit. Eventually though the shame of having to go school on the bus in army fatigues every thursday got too much and I had to quit. In any case, I realised I would much rather be stopping off for a spliff in Brockwell park after school than standing in the quad, in the cold, getting barked at.

Nowadays I tend to dismiss my involvement as a result of a puerile gung-ho attitude fed by the media. But the army is arguably far more fun than the police (soldiers aren’t likely to arrest you or anyone you know in the UK) and it is difficult to see how Ken’s scheme could have much appeal amongst the yoot of today, or indeed of any day.

But there is something even more sinister about this proposal too. Of all the arms of the state to get involved with children the police seem the most inappropriate. The police are, after all, the coercive arm of the state, the government’s tool for maintaining order and rooting out subversion in society. Young people should no more be involved in this than they are in the armed forces, i.e not at all.

Such youth programmes are am echo of the great fascist youth programmes of the early to mid twentieth century, programmes that still exist in parts of the world. Recruiting our children in to the police is a disturbing neo-fascist idea with disturbing implications. Imagine little johnny coming denouncing his parents at school for smoking a spliff, or little Ahmed accusing his dad of saying someone should blow up the queen. The metropolitan police have a deeply damaged image through frequent victimisation of minority groups and young people in particular. They should be kept as far away from our children as possible!

Dx

Filed under: Uncategorized , civil rights, London, mayor, police, youth

bullying is not the answer

This week Jacqui Smith, home secretary, announced provisions for three hundred new ‘anti-terrorist’ cops to investigate terrorist plots and counter radicalisation in the Muslim community.

I don’t think that it is really cool for the main liason between the ’state’ and muslim communities to be the police: that’s a sure fire recipe for alienation.

Rather than helping to reduce radicalisation amongst muslim minorities, the home secretary’s plans can only encourage it. More than any other group in UK society, our muslims are currently the target of vilification and criminalisation on a massive scale. Creating a specific police unit to deal with the muslim ‘problem’ risks giving legitimisation to the behaviour of a radical, criminal minority; it sets them up as a recognised group in opposition to the state, much like the IRA. The government does itself no favours by marking muslim minorities out as anti-establishment.

No-one likes the pigs, really. Especially people who already disproportionally find themselves at the sharp end of the ‘justice’ system. Radical muslim groups are already beginning to acheive a certain level of romantic appeal amongst wider disaffected sections of society. Witness the high proportion of converts among those implicated in terror plots. These converts frequently seem to be young black men who, already alienated from mainstream society, find solace and community in the revolutionary rhetoric of muslim radical groups.

Rather than using the coercive tools of the state to combat radicalisation, the community at large needs to work provide other options for disaffected members of society to make something of themselves.

Filed under: Uncategorized , islam, muslims, police, terrorism, UK