Pointing The Finger – by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson

March 28, 2013 by

LeftCentral Book Review 

Image©Nevit Dilmen

 

…It takes the form of an attack on multiculturalism for which Muslims are held responsible and which is a coded word for them. It cuts across political and ideological divides, and is shared alike, albeit in different degrees by conservatives, fascists, liberals, socialists and communists` (Bhikhu Parekh quoted in Pointing The Finger…)

In April 1964 Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) left Detroit for Mecca, in the midst of an acrimonious split with the `Nation Of Islam`. Malcolm at this time was the USA`s foremost bogey-man, the unacceptable face of the civil rights movement. His position caricatured in the 1950s as `the hate that hate produced` – a view fitting the `orientalism` framework described by Edward Said. Whatever the merits of this documentary about the NOI, it does appear clear that Malcolm`s visit to Mecca changed him, his pilgrimage making him aware of the ethnic diversity of Islam. Recording in his diary, `it seems every nation and form of culture on earth is represented here…`. This revelation, as Manning Marble outlines encouraged Malcolm to alter his view on race. Malcolm reflecting at the time that, ‘I began to perceive that `white man`, as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily, primarily it describes attributes and actions`. Thus a metamorphosis resulted from advances in Malcolm`s `religious literacy` combined with his genius `critical literacy` (concepts outlined and explained in Pointing The Finger). Read more of this post

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Stories, schools and statues – the Tory view of history

January 29, 2013 by 1 Comment

Robin Richardson

copyright Simon Harriyott`s photostream

First, tweeted Michael Rosen recently, they came for Mary Seacole. He was echoing a famous poem about resistance to totalitarian rule. And, he continued, because I’m not a woman and I’m not black, I didn’t speak out.

Well actually, Rosen himself has spoken out with characteristic eloquence about Mary Seacole and her place in the national curriculum in England. And well over thirty thousand people, so far, have signed a petition urging that she should continue to feature explicitly in the teaching of history in schools. There was recently a letter from Jesse Jackson and 50 others about this in The Times, the Archbishop of York has weighed in with an article in the Sun, an early day motion is currently open for signature in parliament, and the issue appears to have split the coalition government wide open, with Nick Clegg pledging he will oppose the new plans for the history curriculum which, according to leaks, Michael Gove is shortly going to announce.

Adding to a widespread sense of outrage, there are rumours that Gove’s private office has blocked access by civil servants at the Department for Education to the website of a distinguished professor of education who has dared to criticise the plans. Next, Rosen’s pastiche might continue, they came for the academics. Read more of this post

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Robert Kee: A Tribute

January 14, 2013 by

Nora Connolly 

Copyright Ireland

Copyright NASA Goddard photostream

Robert Kee the brilliant journalist, historian and campaigner for justice has sadly died aged 93. Kee the quintessential British liberal was also an establishment figure who along with others became involved in the setting up of TV–am in the early 1980s. Robert Kee was friends with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s and the Dowager wrote a glowing testimony of Kee in her memories. Which highlighted Kee`s outstanding intelligence and communication skills. She mentioned Kee`s work with Panorama pointing out that the BBC was lucky to find someone of his calibre. Those viewing any broadcasts by Kee would have to agree with this assessment. Robert Kee spent a long time in Ireland and was a regular visitor to the Devonshire`s Irish estate, Lismore Castle. He rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy but he was no establishment toady and did not allow his grand association`s to debase an overwhelming desire to strive for truth and justice, as his publication `Trial and Error` illustrates. A book which helped bring the disgraceful miscarriage of justice concerning the `Guilford Four` and `Maguire Seven` to public prominence. The book also unddoubtly helped to right judicial wrongs and for this reason alone Robert Kee should be warmly remembered today by all striving for fairness and justice.

Robert Kee also wrote an important biography of Charles Stewart Parnell the `Laurel and the Ivy` but Kee had a vast hinterland to draw upon, he was a war hero a bomber pilot for the RAF, who was shot down over occupied Europe. He become a prisoner of war a role he occupied stoically writing about his experience in his critically acclaimed `A Crowd is not Company`.  Read more of this post

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Draft Data Communications Bill: Interview with Jim Killock

September 6, 2012 by

Left Central’s John Curran 

Image © utnapistimC

The following interview was conducted with Jim Killock Executive Director of Open Rights Group in which he outlines the approach his pressure group are taking in resisting Home Office proposals to introduce a draft data communications bill aka snooper’s charter.

  • If you could highlight the most important features of your campaign what would they be?

Open Rights Group’s campaign is primarily about public engagement – in order to show that the draft Data Communications Bill is an unpopular and highly intrusive breach of UK citizen’s human rights. What we have learnt by talking to Parliamentarians is that many people across the political spectrum share our views and object to these proposals and are concerned about this intrusion into our civil liberties. The big push for this legislation is coming from the narrow confines of the Home Office. We have to counter the information coming from this direction and educate both the politicians and public that the Home Office is wrong.

  • So the Home Office are exclusively responsible for this draft proposal?

The Home Office claims their ability to get hold of data is declining and that they are struggling to keep up. That is how the issue is portrayed, although such a view is in reality difficult to sustain. The trouble is, certain sections of government want to find more out more and more about its citizens. This can cascade into a very significant intrusion and breach UK citizens civil liberties.

Online data is a honey pot for the Home Office and for the Police. They see the draft measure as an opportunity to get hold of more information and the criminal justice angle is a convenient prop for government to hang on to. It is easy to claim that crime can only be solved in this way when they want to sell this type of legislation to the public.

  • The draft Communications Data Bill seems unstoppable what can be done to halt this legislation?

Well I don’t necessarily agree with the premise of your question. Yes, there is a very strong push for this legislation but as I have said it is coming from one government department, the Home Office. There is no overall political consensus operating behind the scenes. One government department has made its case but that is all.

Remember we are talking about a coalition government and many Liberal Democrats do not want this draft bill, and there are significant sections of the Conservative Party that are against it also. It is possible to defeat this government on this issue in a vote. When a government operates with a slim majority individual MPs have significant influence and their views matter. This is not like the days when New Labour had a massive majority and the executive was largely unrestrained. Even a relatively small rebellion could stop this draft proposal, so the Coalition must listen to its backbenchers.  Read more of this post

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The World Turned Upside Down

July 13, 2012 by 1 Comment

Dominic Turner @dominic_turner

Image © Scorpions and Centaurs

In the week that yet more fraud in the banker’s paradise, called The City of London, was exposed, we find the media establishment closing ranks, bemoaning the destruction of trust between the British people and the corrupt iron triangle of politicians, journalists and the financial sector. Indeed, a recent poll revealed only ten and thirteen percent of the public trusted bankers and journalists respectively (and I’m surprised the figure is that high). I can hear it now, the political class crying into their next bottle of Jacobs Creek about the tragic decline of trust in British public life, before trotting out the same self righteous protestations that most people enter public life for noble causes such as cutting taxes for the super rich or slashing benefits for the disabled

I for one find solace in the fact that ordinary people can see these institutions for what they are. Instruments of entrenched privilege almost always inherited or attained through brutality. Why should one shred of faith be placed in institutions that have only served to swindle and actively lobby for the robbery and deceit of the British people? A political class, provided with cover from a servile and supine media establishment, who sent hundreds of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to their deaths, bankrolled by their friends in the financial sector, deserve all the contempt they have earned

However, an unrelenting scepticism of the motives of all public institutions can sometimes lead the impressionable down the blind and treacherous trenches of conspiracy theories. I am in no doubt that the centres of power in London and Washington would like nothing better than for the left to be distracted by absurd and illogical lectures that 9/11 and 7/7 were inside jobs, from someone who has become an expert on structural engineering after spending twenty minutes on the internet. Moreover, conspiracy theories perpetuate this very sense of hopelessness, and give a certain amount of comfort to the lazy amidst our ranks who refuse to believe that civil disobedience, striking and occupying can change society. How could they possibly hope to change the international order if they believe the insane proposition that the world is run by the Jews, or the Freemasons or the Reptilian Humanoids? The plots to undermine and crush the lives of ordinary people are not hatched in smoke filled rooms, but across the policy tables of Whitehall and board rooms of Barclays PLC. The truth, hidden in plain sight, is that something can, and must, be done. And we can only tread the march of human progress in trust and solidarity.  Read more of this post

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U.S: The Divided Nation

July 1, 2012 by

Christian DeFeo 

Image © lumierefl

The town which I come from is like many others in America: it lies just outside a big city, the streets are aligned in near perfect grids, and there is a small downtown area which features a bank and a grocery store.  Churches of varying denominations are in abundance.  The Stars and Stripes flutters over red brick public school buildings, a striking sight on a clear summer’s day.

Looking at the tidy lawns and the carefully painted exteriors of the homes in my town, it is relatively easy to think that this is a prosperous country.  There is an air of quiet affluence that accompanies being house-proud.    On a bright June afternoon, Obama’s America seems a good place to be, particularly in contrast to the depressing images of homelessness, dereliction and unemployment which scar much of Britain and Europe.  Surely, then, Americans should be grateful for their relative good fortune and surely they wish to re-elect the President.

However, go to the next town and the picture changes: in less than a quarter mile along a main thoroughfare, I counted no less than 5 large stores and office buildings that had lost previous occupiers and now were either for sale or rent.  Other stores promise big bargains or state they’re going into liquidation.  The windows of the empty shops are dirty; inside, bills which will never be paid lay scattered along the dusty floors along with brightly coloured junk mail.  This America is bankrupt, broken and clearly dissatisfied.  If this is Obama’s America, then it surely won’t be his for long.

How can the two be reconciled?  When one speaks of either economic despair or boom there is an assumption that its effects are broadly uniform, and exceptions, such as the continuing London property boom are just that, exceptional.  What is striking about America’s economic recovery, however, is how patchy it is: indeed, it is its motif.

As statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show, states which are prospering sit side-by-side with those which are suffering.  For example, Texas’ economy grew 3.3% in 2011 while next door in New Mexico, growth was just 0.2%.  North Dakota’s economy grew a staggering 7.6%; this is largely due to its tapping into natural gas resources.  Its neighbour, South Dakota, grew at a measly 0.8%.  As my former home town and its neighbour illustrate further, this patchiness extends to a micro level: towns which thrive and suffer live in close proximity.  While the overall economy may grow, this strange mosaic prevents an overall impression of well-being from taking root.  Read more of this post

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Australia’s Media Ownership Debacle

June 20, 2012 by

Georgia Lewis 

Image © Mohamedn

Fairfax has been a presence on the Australian media scene since 1841 when John Fairfax bought the Sydney Morning Herald. Since then, successive generations of the Fairfax family have owned the company. Their power and influence over the Australian media landscape is not new. In a week where there has been a twin outcry over Australia’s richest woman, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, owning an 18.67% stake in the company and trying to demand three board seats, and concurrently the loss of 1,900 jobs at Fairfax, the closure of printing presses, the merging of newsrooms, the shrinking of broadsheets to tabloids and the suggestion that print editions will become online only with more paywalls going up.

The latest news is that Ms Rinehart won’t get the three seats – or indeed any seats on the board- or the right to hire and fire editors, as per her demands. She refused to sign Fairfax’s Charter of Editorial Independence. As a multibillionaire, she knows she can try and buy more influence in the form of a bigger stake in Fairfax. Her £55 million share spending spree is small change. It is also no secret that she feels Fairfax papers, most notably the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age, are anti-mining and that the paper’s party line is that mining companies should pay more tax. Editorial staff at Fairfax have insisted their journalists are independent and not influenced by commercial constraints.

But for how much longer? Will Ms Rinehart keep buying more and more shares? It seems the current Labor government has no issue with this. Stephen Conroy, the breathtakingly ineffective Communications Minister opined that Ms Rinehart is entitled to turn Fairfax papers into “the mining gazette” but but warns she can’t “trash” the Fairfax brand for other shareholders. Surely, turning the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age into the mining gazette is a trashing of the brand of the highest order? He went on to tell a radio programme: ”I’m not sure government can do a lot when it comes to maintaining the independence of journalists and editors from boards of companies.”  Read more of this post

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Tony Blair is a War Criminal

June 15, 2012 by

Nicholas Pentney 

Image © World Economic Forum

Tony Blair’s recent testimony at the Leveson Inquiry was interrupted when an angry protester breached security and branded the former PM a War Criminal. David Lawley Wakelin, a film-maker, managed to storm the supposedly secure hearing by using the judge’s corridor and then proceeded to let Blair have it in full view of the inquiry team and press. This was not the first time Blair has been confronted by someone in this manner. In September 2010, activist Kate O’Sullivan attempted to make a citizens’ arrest upon the former PM for war crimes whilst he was signing copies of his autobiography in a Dublin book shop.

After such incidents, the media devote their attention to the breach of security that allowed those involved to get so close to Blair. The accusations themselves seldom receive as much attention and the accusers like Wakelin are dismissed as “crazed” or as “lone idiots.” In reality however, Wakelin and O’Sullivan are neither crazy nor idiotic but rather spot on – Tony Blair is a War Criminal. He may lack the comical get-up of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character in The Dictator but nevertheless, he can be accurately described as a War Criminal for committing the “supreme international crime” of aggression.

The US/UK invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression. It violated the principle of Nuremberg and the UN Charter. Aggression is the very crime that the Nazis were convicted and subsequently hung for at Nuremberg. Robert Jackson, the chief counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg clearly defined aggression: “Declaration of war upon another State/ Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State/Attack by its land, naval or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels or aircraft of another State.”  Jackson also made it clear that there were to be no exceptions barring one: “No political, military, economic or other considerations may serve as an excuse or justification for such actions, but exercise of the right of legitimate self-defence, that is to say, resistance to an act of aggression, or action to assist a State which has been subjected to aggression, shall not constitute a war of aggression.”  Read more of this post

Filed under Labour, Media, Middle East Tagged with , , , ,

Guest Blog: The third of May will be a decisive day

April 6, 2012 by

Image

Image © Matt Hobbs

Tom Vine

The week did not begin well for the mayoral contest. After a debate on radio channel LBC, Boris distastefully called Ken Livingstone a “f***ing liar” after Livingstone accused him of using similar tax arrangements as have been causing much controversy over Livingstone’s candidacy. Livingstone was quoted afterwards saying he and Boris are in “exactly the same situation” concerning their earnings.

Yet, what is frightening about this whole situation is not the fact that these men are choosing to pay corporation tax on their earnings over income tax but that our current Mayor of London feels he has the right to call Livingstone, let alone anyone, a “f***ing liar.” What’s also coincidentally convenient for Boris is the way in which the contest has been transformed into criticising Livingstone over taxation on his earnings. Admittedly, I felt as though Livingstone had, in a way, betrayed the left. But as I began to doubt the security of my Ken Livingstone vote, I realised how puny this issue is compared to what really matters for Londoners: housing, crime levels and the amount it costs you to get to school or work each day.

These are the very issues the mayoral candidates (of which a full list can be found here) have been debating for the past few weeks in an attempt to win our votes. These are issues which effect us Londoners directly. Knowledge of Ken and Boris’ tax arrangements isn’t going to reduce my tube or bus fares, so why should I care?

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Ups and downs in job numbers in the northeast

March 8, 2012 by

Georgia Lewis

Image © Colin

People who probably had no idea the Geneva Motor Show was even happening this week were made well aware of it after a surprise announcement by Nissan. A new compact car is to be manufactured at Nissan’s Sunderland plant, a rare beacon of economic hope and employment in the beleaguered northeast of England.

Sky News was first to jump on the bandwagon with the declaration that it was great news for the job market and they fitted in a spot of Cameron cheerleading because this happened partly because of £9.3 million in support from the government. Never mind that it mostly happened because of £125 million in investment from Nissan – through the Sky News prism, this was irrefutable proof that the Con-Dems are serious about job creation.

First, the good news – this means about 600 new jobs at the plant and when you add in jobs created along the supply chain, up to 2,000 new jobs. Not only are there new positions being created but, for the current employees at the plant, they can enjoy a greater sense of job security. This is great news indeed and will make for many happy households in the northeast.

But let’s not get too excited about an economic revival of the northeast just yet. Last November, multinational mineral resource processing company Rio Tinto announced the closure of an aluminium smelter in Lynemouth, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Blaming carbon taxes for the closure, this has resulted in the loss of 515 jobs. Last May, Indian company Tata Steel cut 1,500 jobs in nearby Teesside and Scunthorpe, a bit further south, again citing the costs involved in reducing emissions. So that’s 2,515 people looking for work many miles north of Westminster.

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