Hillsborough, justice, and vilification of the working class

Justice has finally come for the Hillsborough relatives; late, and after too much unnecessary pain being heaped on them, too many obstacles put in their way, too much opposition from establishment organisations – the police, the media, political spin doctors - putting their own weasely backsides before the truth.  But finally the truth is being told.  

There is so much detail to look at, but there are few passages that better sum up the horror of what the establishment did to citizens it had disdain for than this:


"While the tabloid screamed that "the truth" was fans pickpocketing victims and urinating on cops, the real truth was the police probing victims' criminal records and taking blood samples from dead children in the hope of establishing drunkenness."


Take a while to let that sink in.  

It’s not my purpose here to go through the details, for that there are better places to look, such as the excellent work done by Eleanor Barlow, here outlining the way the myths were busted by the inquiry: “The Hillsborough myths exposed by the inquests as a tissue of lies”.  Please take the time to read it. 

As we take in what has been uncovered here, what people are more and more coming to terms with is the fact that time after time, the police and the media have been involved in cover-up and lies. Someone dies, so the reaction of the police is to lie about the victim.  

Take Jean Charles de Menezes.    Instead of owning up to their failings, the police lied about what had happened and lied about the character of the victim.  The inquest jury in December 2008 rejected the official account of events, but was told it did not have the option to return a verdict of unlawful killing.  

Take Ian Tomlison, where the police followed that same pattern of cover-up and assassinating the character of the victim. (http://www.iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk).

Take Orgreave, where the BBC and the police colluded in telling lies about striking miners.  (http://otjc.org.uk)  - The BBC, it much later turned out, was then, and is still, a member of the CBI.  During every industrial dispute it covered, and in which it broadcast quotes from the CBI, it never once declared an interest.

The list could go on.  But what we get a picture of is of the resources at the disposal of the elite, the state, weighed against ordinary people.

For the relatives of the 96 Hillsborough victims, this has been a tough 27 years.  They have borne it with dignity, dedication and tenacity, while they, their loved ones, their fellow football fans, their city, has been heaped with vilification and ridicule.  The open class prejudice with which the media has portrayed Liverpudlians has been overwhelming.  Comedians play the stereotypes for cheap laughs.  Politicians, such as Boris Johnson, join in.  But it’s not funny: what is at the bottom of this is cover-up and smear, and the disdain that the establishment has for working class people.

Remember that lesson when you read media reports of strikes, when you read about the supposed character of someone who has died at the hands of the police, or about the character of people who are on low wages or out of work.  

The Hillsborough Justice Campaign 

Brief thoughts on the Daily Record

The Daily Record has a shameful record as a reactionary rag. During the Clause 28 debate it actively campaigned, with whipped-up homophobic zeal, to try to create support for the homophobic Clause 28 which just didn't exist.

The disgraceful role of the Record in the Keep the Clause campaign (which sought to have the legislation banning councils from "promoting" homosexuality retained) cannot be ignored. There was no grassroots campaign to "Keep the Clause", just the homophobic paranoia of a rich man and his allies at the Daily Record and the Daily Mail. Oh yes, and the hypocritical self-loathing of Cardinal Winning.

The Record was trying to sway the opinion of its readers and the population as a whole, not follow it. With that background, the Record's support for equal marriage in Scotland, which it announced in 2013, seemed opportunistic and less-than-sincere.

 But that's not all: in 2001 it not only put its racism on show, but also seemed to condone, or at least excuse, the murder in Glasgow, of Kurdish refugee Firsat Dag. "Stabbed Turk Firsat Conned his Way in as Asylum Seeker" raged the disgraceful front page banner. The Record took its information uncritically from the Turkish government, from whose anti-Kurd oppression Dag was fleeing, but that did not deter the Record from describing Dag, in the wake of his murder, as a "con man who came to this country to make a fast buck". That is hate-peddling pure and simple. There can be no justification for this type of journalism. It cannot even be called unconscious racism: it is open, vile and unacceptable.

 That level of vileness cannot simply be written off as a mistake. It will take a lot to convince me that there has been a change in culture at that vile rag.

We Can Care About More Than One Tragedy At A Time

One of the strangest responses we see time and again when an atrocity occurs is from those people who seem to say that mourning one tragedy means feeling nothing about another.  “What about x, y, or z?” they will say, seeming to imply that we can only care about one tragedy at a time.  Worse, it is sometimes implied that because you mourn the victims of a tragedy that you therefore support any reprisals carried out using that tragedy as an excuse.

On Friday, Paris was hit by terrorist attacks killing 129 innocent people going about their lives.  On Sunday, the French government launched airstrikes against Raqqa in Syria.  We know such strikes can kill innocent people as well as the Daesh positions they claim were ‘precisely targeted’. 

Yes, the former has had far more coverage than the latter.  But paying our respects to the victims of the Paris attacks does not imply that we support the airstrikes carried out by the French state.

Many of us have friends or relatives in France.  We may have been there on holiday.  It is natural that we have empathy for the people there, sympathy for the relatives of the victims, an interest in what is unfolding across the channel.

My daughter lives in France, so it’s only natural that I take an interest in events there.  We exchanged messages over the weekend, and although she wasn’t in Paris at the time she does live near where several arrests were made.  But just because her workplace observed a minute’s silence today does not mean she or her workmates support the airstrikes.

Social media of course limits the nuances of feeling and argument to bare headlines, and tends to polarise debate in ways that might not be intended.  But we owe it to ourselves and to the future to take some time to think a bit more deeply about a topic than is allowed in 140 characters.

Kenan Malik wrote for Al Jazeera in the wake of the Paris attacks an article that I recommend we pay heed to.  He warns against assuming a simple causal relationship between French foreign policy and the attacks:

“The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state, or of French militarism. They did not even target tourist spots. They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out.

The cafes, restaurants, bars and music venue that were attacked - Le Carillon, La Belle Equipe, Le Petit Cambodge, and the Jewish-owned Bataclan - are in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, areas that, though increasingly gentrified, remain ethnically and culturally mixed and still with a working-class presence.

The other venue attacked was the Stade de France, the national football stadium. France and Germany were playing a game there on Friday night, and French President Francois Hollande was in attendance.

But the Stade de France, like France's national football team, also has great cultural resonance. "Les Bleus" - as the team is known - are seen by many as an embodiment of multicultural France, a team consisting of "noir, blanc, beur" (black, white, Arab) players. It was in the Stade de France that Les Bleus, led by Zinedine Zidane, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, famously won the World Cup in 1998.

What the terrorists despised, what they tried to eliminate, were ordinary people drinking, eating, laughing, and mixing. That is what they hated - not so much the French state as the values of diversity and pluralism.”

I want to reiterate that message: what was deliberately targeted was ethnically and culturally mixed areas with a working-class presence.  Places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out.

It is often said that the refugees are also fleeing Daesh, and that’s true.  It’s often said that Daesh kill more Muslims than anyone else.  It’s often said that Daesh kill more in the Middle East than anywhere else.  All that is true.  But remember also that those places targeted by the terrorists in Paris are places where French people of North African descent hang out, live, relax, and mix with people of other ethnic backgrounds.  It is specifically the shared multi-ethnic lived experience that the terrorists despise.

The victims included people of North African descent, people born in Morocco, people born in Congo.  And that was deliberate. That was the reason those locations were chosen.  So imagining that paying respects to the victims of those attacks in some way means you necessarily support some sort of monolithic Frenchness is very wide of the mark.

I was in a bar in France a few weeks ago, and saw this sign hung on the wall by the owner opposing racism and saying it wasn’t welcome in her bar:

"Racism prohibited here!"

She has doubtless expressed her mourning for the Paris victims today and in the past few days.  Should we interpret that mourning as a unity of identity with the French state and its foreign policy?  I’d suggest we have no basis on which we could do so.

Of course it doesn’t help that many of those wishing to express solidarity with
Parisians have chosen to put French flags on their Facebook and Twitter pages.  While those people may simply have picked an easily identifiable symbol for France, it has for others muddied the waters and caused them to assume that all solidarity with Parisians is also support for the foreign policies of the French state.  It’s for reasons like that that I have been careful not to use the Tricolore in that way.  Indeed, I am suspicious of flags in general.

I’d also ask people to consider that while someone may Tweet a picture of a candle-lit vigil for the victims of the Paris attacks in one moment, they may in the past have posted about the Middle East, about Gaza, about their opposition to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, about their opposition to the arms trade. I have posted about all these things, yet bizarrely found myself defending a tweet about the minute’s silence for the victims of the Paris attacks. Don’t just assume people have only one interest.  Do you have only one interest? 

For example, I exchanged messages with my daughter in France over the weekend, but just this morning exchanged emails with an old friend in the Middle East.  So while I have family connections in France, that doesn’t exclude me from having connections elsewhere in the world.

So don't assume that observing a vigil for victims of one tragedy means I didn't observe a vigil for victims of another.  As a matter of fact I have observed vigils for victims of other tragedies, including those killed in Gaza.  As a matter of fact, I have done concrete things to offer mutual aid and solidarity to refugees.  And no, that doesn't mean I've neglected local foodbanks.  But why should we have to justify ourselves to those who see the world as polarities, either on or off. Those binary arguments are as myopic as they are fallacious.  

That is the thing about humanity – we can’t be pigeon-holed into hermetically sealed monolithic cultures.  We cross cultures, we share various interests, we share this world.  And that is exactly what Daesh hate.  Don’t do their job for them by trying to limit us and to separate us out.

My experience of being in the Question Time Audience

It has to be remembered that Question Time is a television programme, and although it is edited a little before it airs, the show has to have at least a degree of polish.  For that reason, there is a degree of briefing that the audience face.  Whether intentional or not, this will have the effect of choreographing the audience to a certain extent.

What happens is that you turn up early, you are given tea/coffee and sandwiches in a holding area, and you are greeted by Dimbleby and production team. Dimbleby then leaves, and the team talks you through the procedure, and primes you on etiquette. You are then given an A4 briefing sheet each, with 6-8 headlines each with a paragraph of explanation on the “stories of the week”. This is "to help you decide on your questions". Then you are issued with slips on which you can compose questions to be submitted.

The question slips are then collected, and the ones that will be called are selected. You are told that the questions selected will fairly represent the questions submitted. If your name is read out, you are taken away for a further briefing. I don't know what this entails, as I wasn't chosen, perhaps because I didn't stick to the topics on the briefing sheet. All the questions that were pre chosen when I attended matched the briefing sheet.  I suspect because more questions that match the briefing sheets are written on the slips than are rogue outliers, and so of course those selected did match the topics we’d been prompted on.

You are then ushered into the studio, and take a seat. A warm-up person does a run through, asking for hands up and questions you are likely to ask. This goes on for quite a while. It was interesting that two separate eccentric people with bees in their bonnet asked questions, and were never once picked by Dimbleby during the recording. It seems to me that this is one useful reason for the run through. He will have been told "Wild eyed lady in green on second row. Nutter." So, if you are outside the mainstream, keep it under wraps until the recording light comes on.

I assume that the panel are given similar briefing sheets - probably a little more detailed than the audience one - so that they are able to answer the questions.  The rationale will that it doesn’t make good TV if panel members say they haven’t heard a particular story or have no opinion on it. They may not know the wording of the questions they face, but they'll know what stories they're going to be asked about, and, if politicians,  will probably have had time to message their PR team for advice on the answers.

To stand a chance of asking a rogue question you need therefore to be called when hands are raised during filming.  However, these are meant as supplementary to the discussion already on-going, and Dimbleby of course steers the panel as chair.

The show is pre-recorded and shown later the same evening.

A brief word on Tommy Sheridan

My problem with Sheridan is summed up well by Scott MacDonald here: http://scottmac.org/2015/04/objection-to-robin-mcalpine-speaking-with-sheridan/

Other people will do as they see fit, and if they see fit to give credence to Sheridan, that’s a matter for them. 

Some say “hasn’t he paid for what he did? Don’t you believe in rehabilitation?”  The trouble with that is that he’s still not said sorry for dragging comrades and sexual partners through the courts in a vain attempt to salvage his own ego, and he’s still not admitted he was in the wrong.  He still talks about clearing his name, which means that he’s still calling his former comrades and partners liars  - people who were dragged into court at his behest, not through their own doing, even though he’s the convicted perjurer.

That doesn’t seem very rehabilitated to me.  Nor does it seem very comradely.

Yes, he speaks well.  But if that’s your only criterion for decency, then you’re in trouble.

So, go to his rallies if you want to.  But count me out.

Coburn, Racism and Race.

You’ll be aware by now that David Coburn, the UKIP MEP elected last May, is at the centre of yet another controversy caused by his foolish comments.  I hadn’t wanted to dignify his idiocy by giving either the remark or the man too much attention, but that ship has well and truly sailed, and the incident is now widely being used as a hook upon which to hang a debate about racism.

In the remote possibility that you were unaware, he is quoted as referring to the Scottish Government minister Humza Yousaf in these words: "Humza Yousaf, or as I call him, Abu Hamza".

Humza Yousaf was understandably outraged by the comparison, calling the remark racist and Islamophobic, and many have concurred, calling on Coburn to apologize, but some people have responded by saying it was a stupid remark in poor taste, but not racist.

So, what is racism?  Well, let’s start off with what it isn’t: it isn’t scientifically correct.  Race is not a biological or genetic reality.  Scientifically speaking, there are no races; there's only one human race.

The genetic differences between people from ostensibly different "races" are no greater than the differences between individuals from the same "race"; human "races" are not biologically meaningful entities. Whatever your "race", neither you reading this, nor I, differ by more than 7 or 8% of our genes from anyone else.

There is therefore no point in appealing to science to say “that can’t be racism; Muslim’s aren’t a race” (or the Irish, or West Indians, or whatever category is being contested). There are no biological or genetic races within humanity, because ‘race’ isn’t a valid scientific category.  Rather, it’s a social and political construct. 

So how do we define where the boundaries of these social constructs lie?  That vagueness is part of the inherent danger in the notion of race.

Take as an example, forms we have to fill in from time to time - diversity surveys attached to job applications, perhaps, or the National Census.

Forms hope to fudge the difference between a race, a culture, a nation, a population by talking of "ethnicity", but the truth is that there is little agreement on where any of those terms overlap and coincide. Many of my traceable ancestors were Irish, so is my culture Irish? Not really, since I have never lived there, nor did my parents or grandparents. Am I ethnic Irish? The problem is that ethnicity, like race, is difficult to define, and there are no objective rules for deciding what constitutes a race, or for deciding to what race a person belongs. The 2011 Census asked me to choose between being (amongst other things) White Scottish, Other White British, White Irish, Other White, and Any Mixed Background. The truth is that we can all tick that last one, but that none of them really formed any conscious part of my identity, of how I see myself.  If someone asked me to describe myself, at no point would I consider using the phrase “White Scottish”, although I suppose that is what the Census wanted me to tick.

Despite never having lived in Ireland and not possessing an Irish passport or accent, I have nevertheless been called Irish, and abused as having stereotyped supposed Irish traits, because I belong to the population group in Scotland that is descended from Irish Catholics.  It seems incredible now, but a teacher at my school used to regularly call me Irish, despite my attempts to correct her. She would attribute various negative traits to that Irishness – untidiness, laziness, explosive temper, and a disproportionate fondness for the colour green (she was an art teacher). 

It is my contention that this was indeed racist abuse.  It was abuse based on prejudices held by that teacher, and related to what she conceived of as congenital, genetic or inherent traits she claimed she saw in me that she believed were typical of “Irishness” (none of which I recognised in myself, including the supposed fondness for green!).  Sometimes she wouldn’t add any slur on the Irish character, but simply say I was Irish.  But that was more than just inaccurate, because I knew the attitude and implications that went with it.  Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t feel scarred or traumatised by these events.  I simply recount them as an illustration of my point: the race here was in the eye of the beholder; I did not feel Irish, nor did I consider myself Irish, nor did I consider my family culture to have been Irish.  But the fact of my ancestry was used by my teacher to make discriminatory remarks. It was racism.

So did David Coburn do something similar?  On the face of it his “joke” was that part of Humza Yousaf’s name is a bit like part of Abu Hamza’s name.  But there is more to it than that.  Wordplay, in order to be worth repeating, has to carry some sort of meaning.  Coburn wasn’t just repeating nonsense syllables, he was playing on a perception that has currency about Muslims and terrorism.

Nor was it equivalent, as a letter in today’s Scotsman suggested, to calling George Bush a terrorist.

George Bush is called a terrorist by some because of his actions, not because his funny foreign name sounds a bit like another man who is a terrorist, nor because there’s a perception that people from Bush’s cultural background are inclined towards terrorism.  There is no such stereotype. 

Humza Yousaf has no history of initiating or supporting foreign wars, as Bush has.  The “joke” Coburn made was based purely on the name and the cultural background of both men.

It’s quite clear cut as far as I’m concerned – Coburn’s remarks can be categorised as a racist slur.  It was anti-Muslim racism.  (I discuss the term Islamophobia elsewhere in this blog). 

Some have suggested that Coburn should be arrested for hate speech.  I think that would be foolish and counter-productive.  He’s a boor and a buffoon, and the best response is to tell him so, not to criminalise his actions.  UKIP repeatedly show themselves to be a party of pub bores, the type of person who you can imagine spouting half-baked theories and petty prejudices in a golf club clubhouse in 1970.  They should be challenged on their nonsense, not arrested.

Useful links: 

http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/multiculturalism_if.html

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/category/politics/multiculturalism/

If I Call You a Liberal

If I call you a liberal, I mean it in a specific sense.  Not to mean that you belong to a capital L political party, nor, as those on the American right do, to mean that you are somewhere to the left of wherever the speaker stands, nor do I mean that you are generous in some way.

Rather, I use it to mean that your position ignores the structural issues in the problem being discussed.  I use it to mean that you are seeing the problem in terms of individual behaviour rather than social construction.  I use it to mean you are missing some important systemic formation, such as class. Usually class.

For example, if you are complaining of media bias but are seeing that bias in terms of the individual behaviour of individual journalists, then your approach is liberal.  Here, Ed Herman explains why he and Chomsky believe a structural explanation is the one that’s needed. 

The liberal limits ideas to individual behaviour.  The liberal thinks that in order to free the media from bias, all that is needed is for individuals to behave better, more morally, more fairly.  While these aims may in themselves be laudable, they will have limited effect, as the structures will not have been tackled.  The liberal’s ideas therefore lack rigour.  If I call you liberal, I am saying your analysis lacks rigour.

This limiting lack of rigour defines the liberal response to the ills of capitalism for a reason.  Liberalism became a political expression of the capitalist class.  It offers a lack of rigour because it doesn’t want to overturn the privilege of the elite.  It limits the debate to a discussion of individual morality, because that way change itself is limited. Liberalism offers individual guilt that change has not come fast enough, but it does not offer real change.

If I call you a liberal, I don’t mean it as a compliment.