No parlour Inglese?

As this picture I took and Tweeted on Wednesday has attracted some local press attention and a lively debate online, I thought I'd post it here and say what I think in more than 140 words. It's in the window of a tattoo shop, New Romantic Ink, 20 yards from my flat.

On Twitter, I called it racist, discriminatory and just plain dumb. Dumb's easy: although reading and speaking skills don't always go together (I can read Latin and Welsh but can't speak them to any standard), it seems unlikely that anyone who can't speak English will be able to read the sign, so it's a little self-defeating.

Discriminatory? Yes: most of the world's population is excluded from this shop. Racist? I think it is. The owners of the shop and their friends contacted me on Twitter to accuse me of lacking the 'bollocks' to come in and talk about it, but they also explained to me and the local paper that an Iranian customer who spoke no English had issued death threats (despite not speaking English?) over a disagreement, and that forms need to be completed by customers. The man was arrested, which seems perfectly fair to me.

I do think the sign is racist though. Apart from the hostile phrasing ('don't even bother'), the owners have responded to one awful and frightening event by making a link between linguistic ability and behaviour. It feels to me like the the inability to speak English is a coded way of excluding foreigners, and the exclusion of all non-English speakers because one person behaved appallingly clearly roots that behaviour in cultural/racial/linguistic difference without regard for personal responsibility or the enormous variation in human behaviours. It implies, too, that English-speakers can behave however they like in the shop – and as we all know, people with BNP and EDL tattoos are charming gentlemen one and all.

I hope the customer who threatened the staff at New Romantic Ink is subjected to the full force of the law. But I hope too that the shop's staff learn to differentiate between one arsehole and the many billions of people whose custom they've turned down. It reminded me far too much of the famous 'No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish' signs formerly displayed in British shops and boarding houses.

I'm pretty certain, too,  that a tattoo shop owner would object to a ban on people with tattoos in other places.

PS. Reading the newspaper article, I wonder how much my friend Paul Uppal had to grit his teeth before agreeing with me!

Update: I had a conversation with the owners on BBC Radio the other day. It was all very cordial and thoughtful, though I (and the presenter) wasn't entirely convinced that the sign going up minutes after an altercation with a threatening Iranian customer was entirely coincidental.

The sign has now been replaced with this one, which made me laugh quite a lot. Genuinely funny.

Cynical, moi?

I may have mentioned my suspicion that Paul Uppal MP's shameless pandering to religious groups over the past couple of years is nothing more than a cynical and racist election strategy. The alternative, of course, is that he actually believes religious people are superior to the rest of us. I'm not sure what's worse.

Anyway, I have this feeling that Paul was picked because the Tory party knew it had a problem appealing to ethnic minority voters, and that the Conservative Party believe (as have other parties) that voters will turn out along party lines. Shamefully, the Labour Party has on occasion behaved the same way. And it's certainly true that in some places, at some times, the electorate appears to voted along racial lines. It is also true that at times of racial tension, elected representatives who have experienced the discrimination and hostility which goes on might reassure under-represented communities that their specific needs will be addressed. Not in this case, however. Despite being Enoch Powell's old stamping ground back in the day, this city is remarkably free of the racial tensions which blight other places. The Labour Party and other groups have done a great job in tackling racial discrimination while insisting that we citizens are united by our political requirements and ideals, whatever our ethnic origins. The Conservative Party, sadly, wants to undo the bonds we've forged across these borders.

Me, I'm not racist. Not even a little bit. I don't think that this city's Sikh community, or any other ethnic group, will look at Paul and say 'hey, he might be a weaselly, craven and self-interested bigot who doesn't like to talk about his millions of pounds acquired through socially-destructive speculation, but he looks like us!'. They will weigh up the man's merits and that of his party, then decide on those lines. Some will vote for him, some will vote against him.

Political parties in the 90s have taken a nasty, disturbing turn towards bloc politics. The Labour Party in the 1990s, led by people who'd never met the working-classes, let alone emerged from them, assumed that poor whites were racist xenophobes, and played on their supposed fears, pushed by Michael Howard's nakedly vicious 'are you thinking what we're thinking?' campaign (we weren't). But away from the headlines, there's a dangerous move away from politics (what do we want government to do? How shall we pay for it?) to identity.

Which leads me to Gary Gibbon's blog. Gary is a rather good Channel 4 journalist who's currently out in India covering the Prime Minister's arms sales trip. Who has caught his eye? Why, it's Paul Uppal MP! Why's he there? His family were refugees from Uganda, not immigrants from India. Well, it's all about the visuals:

The polling suggests he cannot win the 2015 general election without winning support amongst ethnic minority voters. They are a key wedge of support in some marginals and, as I said yesterday, Sikhs have been identified by Team Cameron as particularly susceptible to the idea that the PM is different from crustier Tories of the past.
Seats where Sikh voters could make a difference include Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell’s old seat now represented by Tory Paul Uppal with a wafer thin majority. Mr Uppal has been accompanying David Cameron on this trip along with Tory MPs Shailesh Varah and ethnic minority vote-winning Tsar MP Alok Sharma. They all have some very good snaps for their election literature and David Cameron has useful pictures too.
Polling suggests some ethnic minority voters want to see individuals from their own communities before they’ll truly believe the Tory Party has changed.

The BNP asks white people to vote for it because they're white. How is this stunt different? It's deeply cynical – a way of brushing the awkward arguments under the carpet: the EU, education, health, the deficit, welfare cuts, the lot: including the way ethnic minorities suffer the worst cuts and blows from this appalling government. Instead, Uppal's basing his appeal solely on his skin colour.

We don't have enough political representatives from ethnic minorities, or females. I firmly believe parties should be searching for good candidates. But putting them up for election only in places with large ethnic votes is simply a thinly-disguised acceptance of racism. It tacitly admits that white people won't vote for minority candidates and minority communities will vote for someone who looks like them over someone who doesn't. I think British people are much more mature than that, but when the parties behave in this way, it authorises racialised discourse. The BNP must be loving this because it perfectly suits their agenda. And of course it's the curse of Northern Ireland: in an upcoming by-election, the major unionist parties are trying to find a single candidate so that they can get Protestants to vote for a Protestant and win rather than dividing the vote between political parties with differing political beliefs. Never mind the principles, they're saying, be tribal.

Finally, this disgusting strategy won't work. The inhabitants of this benighted city voted in Paul Uppal by a majority of only 691, running against a Labour MP representing the most reviled and exhausted government in decades. The voters have already had a chance to divide along racial lines and they didn't take it. They're better than that, and they won't be fooled by a few pictures of Cameron and Uppal wearing bindis and admiring the Taj Mahal.

??? This is STILL OK?

Another post, another trip back in time.

I like Private Eye, though more for the investigative journalism than the rather tired jokes. They nailed the heart surgery scandal and numerous corporate tax evaders. But I'm struggling to find an interpretation of this which isn't just plain racist. Anyone?

Is it 'cos he is Asian?

As you know, I've become increasingly concerned with the safety of Paul Uppal MP, who has been missing in action for about a month, judging by his website and Twitter feed.

Good news! He's hard at work writing a report for David Cameron on how to win the election by connecting with ethnic minority voters!

This might seem a little odd coming from a man who once sneeringly referred to the 'race relations circus' when a racist Tory friend of his lost his job, but never underestimate Paul's willingness to change his opinions for the sake of preferment.

Here's what he said, on a blog which mysteriously disappeared when he got elected (shame a highly-educated MP doesn't know what to do with an apostrophe either):

… the McCarthyistic mouth foaming utterances of the race relations industry, which through accusation alone can slay political careers and stifle well intentioned and principled debate. I say this because I have seen with my very own eyes the modus operandi of this circus, employing individuals to perpetuate this climate of political correctness. In reality this industry/business does dreadful damage to Britain’s race relations. It seems more concerned with securing it’s own funding streams and non jobs for it’s membership of zealots. The cost of this is all is so much more than financial, as we lose decent people and gag those who point to the emperor’s new clothes.

Never mind, either, that the Tories have always been disdainful of 'identity politics': when votes are in question, they'll do anything.

Sadly for Lazy Paul, I think he'll find that a) 'ethnic minority' voters are likely to share the same concerns as non-minority citizens: finding a job, keeping a job, decent schools and healthcare, and an honest government working for the good of all. Presumably the Tories have given up on these, and are trying to find ways to stereotype ethnic minorities as somehow sharing Tory values.

In case you're from an ethnic minority and find yourself tempted to vote Tory, remember this racist (and illiterate) Tory poster. One candidate in the Smethwick 1964 by-election replaced 'coloured' with the N-word in his speeches.

And let's not forget the Conservative Students' popular t-shirt and sticker campaign, which echoed Margaret Thatcher's claim that Mandela was simply a terrorist:

No doubt the Conservatives have improved, but there aren't many ethnic minority MPs, and most of those are in constituencies with large ethnic minority populations: it's almost as though white Tories won't vote for non-white candidates. Hence Derek Taylor and Warsi getting places in the House of Lords rather than achieving election. Then of course there's the Monday Club, the hysterical language used to demonise immigrants, refugees and Romany/Travellers, the Nazi songs sung at Tory stag dos and Tory student parties, and countless examples of golf-club bigotry. Let's not even mention the Tory fury at criticism of the police when Stephen Lawrence was murdered. Boris Johnson described the Metropolitan Police as the 'victims', which seems a little bit odd. But then, he did refer to black people as 'grinning picanninnies' with 'watermelon smiles' (his defence: he was 'quoted out of context', which is what Hitler would have said at Nuremberg). And of course there's the curious Tory decision to leave the mainstream European Conservative grouping and join in with the Polish, Hungarian and other Holocaust deniers. But you don't have to believe me: Conservative Party MP Priti Patel told the Financial Times that 'racist attitudes do persist within the party… there is a lot of bigotry around'.  

Paul: if you want ethnic minority people to vote for you, how about this:

1. Fix the economy

2. Stop punishing the poor.

3. Tackle institutional racism

4. Stop bombing their ancestral homes on a whim. 

5. Explain why - and then fix - the massive imbalance in non-white unemployment, educational achievement and presence in politics, business and the arts. 

But of course Paul and his boss aren't interested in policy. It's about marketing. 

Land of Lost Content

OK, a few more pictures from this bonkers, and disturbing, museum: some of the racist stuff really bothers me. See the full set here. Click these to enlarge.

Hugely popular free gifts from Robertson's Marmalade: golliwogs

Deeply racist postcard

Another terrifying doll: this Girl's World one's hair grows, I gather

Spacehopper box

Mansell's Gay Panties. 

Cushions of Wham! and Kylie and Jason

Hilda Ogden (Coronation Street) bust

9/11 rug. 

Not in my library!

Over in America, they ban books. The British are much more daring: the UK government is closing entire libraries. Can't be too careful. Anything the oiks read might be subversive. Best to be on the safe side and shut down the entire system. Think big, Yankees!

So what's on this year's American Library Association top ten of challenged books?

1. And Tango Makes Three (penguin chick adopted by two male penguins)
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (teenager masturbates in one part of a book about being a disabled Native American schoolboy: if they can't read about it, they won't do it)
3. Brave New World (eugenics dystopia)
4. Crank (teenage drug addiction and naughty words in free verse!)
5. The Hunger Games (dystopian violence, sex)
6. Lush (sex, drugs, profanity - but it's a novel about a teenage girl dealing with her father's alcoholism)
7. What My Mother Doesn't Know (sex): it's poetry about a teenage girl's coming of age - and sounds rather good.
8. Nickel and Dimed (distinguished journalist takes menial jobs, points out that Americans are exploited horribly!)
9. Revolutionary Voices (homosexuals' stories about being homosexual!)
10. Twilight (violence and religious objections).

I'm ashamed to say I have only read Brave New World and Nickel and Dimed. The trend seems to be towards stopping teenagers reading educational books dealing with adolescence. After all, if they don't know about these things, they'll never discover them and won't have to deal with them. That's the way the world works, isn't it? I doubt, somehow, that Crank, for instance, is actually encouraging teenage girls to become crystal-meth addicts…

Nickel and Dimed is a bit of a shocker. It seriously seems to imply that some Americans don't object to their fellow citizens living in permanent utter poverty - they just object to anyone else knowing about it. Do buy the book: the secret to America's economy is that illegal migrants and desperate citizens prop up the system by living hand-to-mouth, denied healthcare, housing and a decent standard of living. That's why big business isn't keen on Tea Party politics: the TPs don't like immigration, whereas the corporations see it as a perfect way to smash the working classes and keep wages down.

On Twilight, I'm just surprised that the objection isn't literary quality. Yes, it's Mormon, reactionary, misogynistic propaganda, but based on a quick scan in a bookshop, her offences against literature are far more serious.

In some ways, this is a better list than last year's for liberals. In 2009, classics like Huckleberry Finn were on the list because liberals didn't like that novel's use of racially-charged words. I was horrified: you can't rewrite history. Twain wasn't racist by the standards of his day, far from it - but he was enmeshed in the culture and vocabulary of his period, and pretending otherwise is an horrific distortion of history. Acknowledge it, think about it, deal with it: don't pretend it didn't happen. See also: Enid Blyton's Here Comes Noddy Again ('golliwog' car thieves) and other novels (many of Blyton's books have been re-edited) and Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers, renamed And Then There Were None in the US at the time and everywhere subsequently (check out the artwork on that link). I don't think the title should be prominently displayed in bookshops, but we shouldn't pretend that it never existed. Changing titles doesn't help if the text is hopelessly racist either…

Children's books are tricky: I wouldn't want a child reading original Blyton because the casual racism and misogyny is pervasive, and without the experience and understanding which comes with age, a young reader might well absorb these attitudes without question. Far better to give a child something else (especially as Blyton's work is such utter dross too). But I'd still defend the continued existence of Blyton's unedited work for historical and literary purposes. She expressed a specific set of cultural positions, and they struck a chord in a way in which very few other works did. People read this stuff in their millions, so it's important that we think about why and how rather than pretend they never existed. This is why popular fiction is a serious subject for academic study.

Midsomer Madness?

The producer of inexplicably-popular Sunday night crime drama Midsomer Murders has claimed today that part of the appeal of his show is that there are no non-white faces.

"We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work.

"Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn't see a white face there.

"We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added.

"I'm trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which seems to succeed. And I don't want to change it." 

The setting is an English village: such places are almost exclusively white, which is certainly true. What bothers me though is that he isn't really claiming that his show is realist - he's asserting that he has deliberately excluded ethnic minority characters and actors because his audience doesn't want to see them.

I hope - and assume - that this isn't true. I'm sure that a lot of the programme's appeal is the nostalgic presentation of a time-warped village society, but apart from the OAP wing of the British National Party, I'm certain that nobody's settling down of a Sunday evening with the intention of watching something specifically because it's all white.

True-May's racism is clear in his sweeping claim that Slough is non-white. In actual fact, the 2001 census reveals that Slough's population is 58% White British plus 5% White Irish/Other, which looks pretty white to me.

I don't think TV should be tokenistically sticking ethnic minority actors into every show, but I fail to see how skin colour should be a selection factor for a murder comedy drama. To deliberately exclude them does look racist to me. I'm also disturbed by this definition of Englishness as white. Given that the English are an incredible mix of various Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and many other groups, deciding that Englishness is a matter of skin colour rather than location and/or a range of cultural activities (difficult enough in itself) is deeply problematic.

Is this racist?

I know that Top Gear is deliberately designed to wind up non-driving liberal lefties like me, but is it really OK for Richard Hammond and friends to say stuff like this on television?

"Why would you want a Mexican car? Because cars reflect national characteristics don't they?

"Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat."

Jeremy Clarkson and James May went on to describe Mexican food as "refried sick". Clarkson, who has repeatedly been criticised for making offensive comments on the programme, said on Sunday's show there would be no complaints this time because the Mexican ambassador would: "be sitting there with a remote control like this,". The presenter pretended to slump in a chair, snoring.

Britain has a long tradition of racist comedians - Davidson, Manning, perhaps Jimmy Carr, but mainstream society has moved on. The detail of this one really does put it beyond the pale: it's not a quick gag laughing at stereotypes: it's a complete list of them.

I know many of you think I'm humourless, but I really don't see why three publicly-funded bullies can say this kind of thing. If it was Davidson or Manning, or the remarks were addressed to black people or the Scots, there would be public anger. Instead, all that's happening is a stiff letter from the Ambassador, who is wide awake and not very happy.

What a great way to start the day

My union, UCU has issued a special report on the effect of the government's reactionary and moronic education funding cuts. The good news is that The Hegemon isn't one of the four in serious risk of closure.

Instead, we're one of the 23 institutions at a 'high level of potential impact… 9-10 of the 12 'risk points'.

Brilliant. And here's me with a contract which expires in September. More seriously, we do a lot of good work. We provide a high standard of education, often for students who can't or won't go elsewhere: local students, ethnic minority students, the poor, mature students, students with families and working students. You don't get many of those at Oxford. In fact, let's compare: The Hegemon: 40% UK ethnic minorities. Oxford: 1 British-Caribbean student last year. Just one (and Cambridge University has no black members of the academic and technical staff).

If we get closed down, where are all these black people going to go? They've been herded into massive, teaching-led, urban institutions - partly because they're systematically disadvantaged in school too - the kind of places which don't own massive tracts of land, can't reach out to famous/rich/powerful friends for donations, and can't attract top researchers.

Simple. They won't go to university at all.

Black? Get back.

No doubt Oxford and Cambridge (and some of my readers) will provide complex arguments about why this isn't so bad as it appears, but I'm shocked.

more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years.

The university's admissions data confirms that only one black Briton of Caribbean descent was accepted for undergraduate study at Oxford last year.

Let's just reflect on that for a minute. Are we really going to accept that across all classes and educational backgrounds, there was only one British-Caribbean student worthy of a place at Oxford?

Figures revealed in requests made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act by the Labour MP David Lammy also show that Oxford's social profile is 89% upper- and middle-class, while 87.6% of the Cambridge student body is drawn from the top three socioeconomic groups. The average for British universities is 64.5%, according to the admissions body Ucas.

The FoI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff at Cambridge, none are black. Thirty-four are of British Asian origin.

One Oxford college, Merton, has admitted no black students in five years – and just three in the last decade. Eleven Oxford colleges and 10 Cambridge colleges made no offers to black students for the academic year beginning autumn 2009.

No one from Knowsley, Sandwell and Merthyr Tydfil has got to Cambridge in seven years. In the last five years, pupils from Richmond upon Thames have received almost the same number of offers from Oxford as the whole of Scotland. 

The 'élite' universities are the training grounds for power: your chance of success in any field, but especially politics and government, is immensely boosted by attending these places, with their élite social networks. Denying access to the poor, regional and minority ethnic applicant reinforces the closed nature of the ruling class. Obviously, I'd rather make all universities as good and respected, but in the meantime, we need to smash down the doors. These minority applicants aren't asking for relaxed entrance requirements: they're the best. Take exam results out of the equation and we're left with a very crude and unpleasant explanation for why they're rejected. 

Another victory for press regulation

A lesson in media studies: what matters is how you write the rules.

I complained about the local paper, the Express and Swastika, describing Travellers as 'plaguing' the area. I felt that this was discrimination and incitement to racial hatred.

There are problems with this - Irish Travellers are a recognised racial group under the relevant legislation, but not merely Travellers. Fair enough.

What I wasn't expecting was to be told that under Press Complaints Commission rules, Clause 12 (banning discrimination) only applies to individuals. This means that you can't publish an article which reads

Joe Bloggs is mean because he's black/Jewish/Northern/insert stereotype of your choice here

but it's perfectly acceptable to publish an article which reads

All Jews/Blacks/heterosexuals/Northerners are mean.

The only recourse is to challenge the article on grounds of accuracy, as the PCC told me when I proposed this formulation:

The phrase 'all Jews are mean' could be challenged under accuracy but, insofar as Clause 12 goes, it could not be considered a breach.  This is the same for all groups, be they ethnic, religious, gender etc etc.

Got to admire the newspaper industry's skill at setting its own rules. As far as I can see, this means any newspaper can be as racist/discriminatory as they like, as long as they don't single out individuals.

Is the judiciary racist? I refer you to bears and woods

I dismissed the judiciary yesterday as reactionary and out of touch. Today's Guardian diary has a piece which illustrates my point rather neatly:

They got Theresa May to the Home Office, and once she's settled in, is there any chance she might send a quick note to the recorder Robin Pearse-Wheatley, whose expressions of sympathy to two Icelandic women who hooked up with a gang of criminals to commit a brutal "honeytrap" robbery seem a little out of place as we fight to rebuild Broken Britain. But no less out of place than his summing-up of their plight. "You seem to have fallen in with a group of black men which seems to have been the beginning of your unfortunate adventures," he said. "After a series of adventures I won't detail, but including time you were shoplifting – which doesn't reflect well on you at all – you, no doubt at the behest of these frightening black men who you were keeping company with, were involved in this incident." Is it because they is black? Seems it is.

Go Gordon

The scandal of the election has just hit.
Gordon Brown was heckled by a former Labour voter, Gillian Duffy who objected, in strong terms, to immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe and about pretty much everything else (we only have the tail-end on film here). They had a conversation which didn't go particularly well, then he got back into the car.
He still wore his microphone, and after berating his aides for setting the conversation up, described the woman as a bigot.

'that was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman .. . Whose idea was that?' It's just ridiculous ... she was just a bigoted woman

Now he's apologising all round and fudging what he said.

Of course I apologise if I have said anything that has been offensive, and I would never put myself in a position where I would want to say anything like that about a woman I met. It was a question about immigration that really I think was annoying.

I'm blaming myself. I blame myself for what is done. You've got to remember that this was me being helpful to the broadcasters with my microphone on, rushing into the car because I had to get to another appointment.

They have chosen to play my private conversation with the person who was in the car with me. I know these things can happen. I apologise profusely to the woman concerned. I think it was just the view that she expressed that I was worried about that I could not respond to.

Labour spin-doctor:

Gordon has apologised to Mrs Duffy personally by phone. He does not think that she is bigoted. He was letting off steam in the car after a difficult conversation.

No, Gordon. She is a bigot. I know it doesn't look right for the PM to criticise a pensioner, but she made a bigoted comment. You should have told her that. Now you've definitely lost the election.


Ho hum. Decades of Tory rule stretch out before us. The Tory press is going to push this for weeks, as will the BBC.

Shame on you, Hegemon Students

I just remembered something that made me toweringly angry yesterday. I went to the anti-racist demonstration yesterday with several of my colleagues, representing my branch of UCU, the Universities and Colleges Union, having voted unanimously that fascism is a threat to our communal values. 


Notably absent was any representation of the student body. The Hegemon's black and other ethnic minority students make up 37.3% of the total - way bigger than most universities. Being in a classroom reminds me, daily, that the multicultural society works, and enriches the lives of us all. 17% of students are from overseas.


So I was depressingly unsurprised to learn that our Students' Union declined to participate on the grounds that racism and fascism don't 'affect the education of students'. Really? I'm used to our SU being intellectually vacuous, idle and under total control by the institution, but the idea that university life in a poor, ethnically mixed town would be unaffected by far-right politics is utterly insane. 


So pathetic are they that the SU's statement on the demonstration is headed by the logo of the West Midlands Police and includes these contradictory and illiterate gems:

While the Students’ Union encourages students to stand up against fascism and racism, we advise all of our students to think about their actions and any protests they engage with.

we have decided it would be in the best interests of students to not attended this event. The Union feels that students can have a greater impact upon fighting fascism and racism in a number of other ways which can include casting your vote in elections or attending Love Music Hate Racism events. As a union we feel Students do not have to put themselves at risk to stop these groups.

The union would like to state that, we are still in support of United Against Fascism and its activities but, an event like this is something we will not part take in as the welfare and safety of our students is our priority.

So well done. Were Rosa Parks a student at The Hegemon, she'd be advised to get off that bus. Gandhi would be told to stick to his Playstation and Sophie Scholl would have passed all her modules and quietly gone on to work for Nazi victory. 


Student 'welfare' is here so narrowly defined that we'd rather they didn't stand in a car park miles from the fascists than stand up and be counted. What price Welfare when minority students start getting hassled on their way to university, or even on campus itself? I can't quite work out what 'stand up' and 'support' mean in this small-minded and petty statement. 


Amazingly, the SU has shown itself to be even more passive and undemocratic than the police: the statement links to a letter from the police which declares: 'the right to protest peacefully is a sign of a healthy democracy and we have a positive duty to facilitate that right': a right the SU has decided to abandon. 


I'm ashamed of our SU. Maybe it's because I went to a small but vibrant university (Bangor) in which the SU was the centre of my life. There were loads of clubs, two newspapers (Seren in English, which I wrote for and edited, and Y Ddraenen in Welsh, which I helped out on sometimes - about to be replaced by Y Llef), political groups, demos to attend every other week, and above all, a student body which had strong, clear opinions. Here, we get almost total disengagement and short-sighted, consumerist nonsense.


So, black and Asian students (including those who come from overseas and pay massive fees which keep us afloat): if you want a corporate pub crawl and a hilarious Facebook page, come to the Students' Union. If you want collective defence against the forces which consider you to be inferior and repulsive because of your skin colour - try somewhere else. 


Over to you, students. SU's used to be at the heart of civil and political progressiveness. The tide can still be turned.

Valete!

Annoyingly, the office is closed tomorrow, so you'll hear no more of me for a few days, other than the feverish scratching of a quill from my garret as I cobble together something halfway convincing for the Anne of Green Gables paper I'm delivering in Cambridge next week.

Why don't you fill in the time taking the Guardian's First Line Quiz. I got 17 out of 20, though some guesswork was involved. Maddeningly, I've read 2 of the 3 I got wrong. Ho hum.

If you're in the West Midlands on Saturday and fancy facing down the fascists, come to the anti-English Defence League rally in beautiful Dudley: 11 a.m. They've trashed Stoke already, so they've moved on to a town in which rioting won't make the slightest bit of difference to the naked eye.

Seriously though, these people are scum. Let's show them that most Yam Yams aren't bigots.

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.

Don't mention the war

While the England-South Africa cricket is rained off, enjoy this piece of political satire from Spitting Image, 'I've never met a nice South African', which was their contribution to the anti-Apartheid struggle in the early 1980s.



It certainly wasn't the official line: Margaret Thatcher repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist (see David Cameron's apology and Tory former minister Tebbit's rejection of that apology here) and supported the South African regime mostly because it was militantly anti-communist. Oh, and she didn't like black people either. Young Conservatives used to wear t-shirts reading 'Hang Nelson Mandela'.

They'll be back in government in May. Just saying.

So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

Marvel at the arrogance!

Kevin Pietersen is an England cricketer, formerly captain of the team and well-known for his lack of self-deprecation, shall we say. He's almost as good as he thinks he is.

He was born in South Africa and switched allegiance because he didn't like that country's attempt to turn cricket from a whites-only sport to a mixed one by reserving places for black team members.

There's an argument to be had there, sure. However, if you were a white South African with some previous racial disagreement, would you pose for a doctored photograph reclining in Barack Obama's Oval Office chair? To advertise Brylcreem?

Mmm… racially sensitive.

Question Time - how was it for you?

Frankly, I was a little bored. Griffin occasionally let his tightly-controlled facade slip with some very silly comments (indigenous 'British' = those descended from the ice age inhabitants! I'm not sure when the Celts turned up, but the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Dutch etc. all fit Griffin's preferred racial characteristics and arrived a lot more recently than that) and defended his meetings with David Duke of the KKK with the words 'almost entirely non-violent'.

The other guests were pretty weak. They'd all looked up Griffin's past comments and turned every single question towards the BNP's racial policy - to which Griffin had similarly well-planned responses. If the BNP want to be a serious party, they need to have policies on everything, from water metering to agricultural run-off levels - an opportunity was lost to expose how narrow and limited the BNP is. Because they all went over the same ground repeatedly, it became a sterile debate.

I was a bit annoyed about the Churchill debate though - surely someone could have pointed out that he wouldn't have joined the BNP, Tories OR Labour, because he fully supported a United States of Europe (his words), founded the European Movement and received the Charlemagne Prize for his efforts in that direction.

The only person on the show to come out of it well was the playwright and British Museum director Bonnie Greer, somewhat predictably: she was calm, witty, authoritative and didn't hector. Churchill was half-American and got to be PM: let's get Bonnie Greer into Parliament!

I watched the programme while eating a curry, which seemed appropriate. Then this morning I went to the pool and shared the water with immigrants! To whom I then chatted! What a race traitor I am…

After that, I had the immense satisfaction of shouting 'scab' at some postmen. Griffin and his jackbooted fantasists belong in the lowest circle of hell, but scabs will be sitting close by. I should have stuck a stick through the spokes of the one on a bike. I've very few principles (obviously), but one is to never cross a picket line, and it's served me well.