Saturday 23 January 2010

Stoke's in the news again

And as usual, for the wrong reasons…

Today saw a march by the latest bunch of fascists, the English Defence League (weirdly, there's a Welsh Defence League too, though it seems to consist of English men and doesn't concern itself with English second-home owners and the fate of the Welsh language). And as usual, the fascists couldn't control themselves and went on the rampage. The supposed cause was 'Islamic extremism', despite the fact that Stoke's Islamic population is small and well-integrated. There's certainly no sign of extremism.

They simply provocateurs. Stoke's been a multicultural city for well over a century. Jews, the Irish and people from the subcontinent helped to build the city and run its services - particularly the hospitals - without any street-level tension. What's happened to Stoke is that fascists have talked the impressionable into thinking that economic failure is the fault of immigrants, foreign bankers or other strangers: Mosley did it very successfully in the 1930s in this city, and the BNP and their splinter groups are doing the same. When they aren't agitating, there isn't any trouble - instead, the fascists are trying to inflame a situation for their own political ends.

Stoke's problems are those of capitalism. It had three skilled industries: coal, steel and above all, pottery. Globalisation has encouraged the shareholders of all these industries to close down their Stoke operations and move elsewhere without a thought for the workers. Neither the proletariat nor the political parties meant to represent them are organised enough to resist the logic of the market, and into this vacuum stepped the fascists, who've replaced the class analysis with a racial one. It's a tempting argument for some Stokies: failed by the educational system, by the economic climate and by the government, some of them listen to a thug with simple answers delivered in a local or at least working-class accent. 95% of Potters aren't that stupid, of course - but the blame must lie with mainstream politics.

The Tories openly espouse globalisation as 'efficient': their interests have never been those of the working classes, but at least they're honest about it. Labour is more culpable, because it deliberately abandoned all pretence of resisting monetarism and globalisation as soon as power beckoned, too spineless to put an alternative case to the voters.

Islamic extremists didn't steal your job: capitalist extremists did.

2 comments:

Kate said...

New Labour are even more vile and guilty than that - yes they have abandoned the pretence of monetarism and globalisation but at the same time maintain the discourse/rhetoric of 'citizen centred government' (so no wonder 'Stokies' get confused!).

I could rant for ages about how the majority of their policies directly oppose this notion but I might get writers cramp/have a coronary! As one example, in the public sector, thanks to managerialism (which basically means the importing of private sector practices into the public sector - because according to Thatcher, and continued by New Labour - private sector practices are wonderful and everyone in the public sector is useless, and 'fixing' the public sector is simple because it isn't more complex than the private sector or catering to a more diverse range of people with diverse and specialised needs), members of the public are often referred to as 'customers' - an innocent move you may at first assume - but no, a customer has choices about where and whether to use services - does a child just knocked down by a car/person with mental health problems/person who want's their bins emptied have a choice in whether to use a service or which one to use? ER NO!!!!!!!!!

I could provide numerous additional examples about how New Labour policy is contradictory and problematic but you'll get to read about such things soon enough in my PhD!

The problem associated with the issues raised in your post is that New Labour has presented itself as subscribing to 'A Politics Without Adversary' (see Chantal Mouffe article of same name) as well as 'evidence-based policy' (see Janet Newman - 'Modernising Governance') the first is nonsensical/divisive and the second empty rhetoric. It isn't a case of 'what matters is what works' but more a case of 'what matters is what gets votes' hence performance targets which create dysfunctional behaviour such as nurses spending their valuable time taking the wheels off trollies so they can be classed as beds so as to meet a target 'no patients on trollies for more than 48 hours' - they don't have the beds to put them in but are fearful of being marked down as 'poorly performing'.

I could also talk about how New Labour talk of issues such as social exclusion by collapsing themes such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, high crime environments, bad health, poor housing, family breakdown etc into 'chains of equivalence' which do not for example recognise or address the interconnectedness of such problems like 'unemployment causes family breakdown' in order to meaningfully attempt to address such issues, and how 'social exclusion' implies it is the fault of the socially excluded that they are that way (see Fairclough New Labour, New Language').

Politics/Discourse lecture over, you can now go back to reading your book! ;-)

Unknown said...

The ugly scenes here take me back to my year working in a high school in Stoke-on-Trent between 2004-5.
I witnessed ugly scenes of racial tension at the school on a daily basis. I'm sure the tax-paying Potters wouldn't be pleased to hear that for a few months, there were two police vans parked at the school for about an hour each day to stop the kids engaging in racially motivated inter-schoool fights.
Racial tensions were rife and also cross-cutting across the range of ethnic minorities represented at the school. The divisions and intererance in Stoke are sadly far more complex than than the EDL's banners suggest.