Don't shout at the Tele: Queer Politics

I took part in a Worldbytes 'Don't Shout at the Tele, Change the Message' series. I discussed Queer politics and how ideas of equality have changed, with a group of Worldwrite volunteers. Here is the film:

Find out more about Worldbytes

See other films in the 'Don't Shout at the Tele' series

Official anti-racism: the new nationalism?

Once the establishment preached the doctrine of race and nation - now the elites have redefined racism as ‘a secular sin’.

Mick Hume 

Once the British state and establishment used the politics of race to boost its authority. Today, in pursuit of the same self-serving ends, they are instead engaged in a phoney moral crusade behind official anti-racism. Is that anything to celebrate?

The conviction of two men for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 has sparked a national celebration of this apparent victory over the evils of racism. Every section of the media and political elite has jostled to line up behind Lawrence’s parents and sign up to the official anti-racist consensus. As one leading press figure put it, the guilty verdict is ‘a triumph’ not only for the Lawrences but for British justice, policing, politics and the media.

For those of us who campaigned against racism in the bad old days of the 1980s, this looks like so remarkable a turnaround in attitudes that one might almost wonder if we are living not just in another century but on a different planet. Thirty years ago when I joined a group called Workers Against Racism, there was no sympathetic media coverage or mainstream political support for the Asian families being burnt out of housing estates or the black youth being routinely brutalised by the police. The national debate was all about the scourge of ‘immigrant scroungers’ and black ‘muggers’. Those who fought against racists were branded extremists, the flipside of the fascists.

Let’s be clear. This was not the ‘unwitting’ prejudice described by the Macpherson inquiry into Lawrence’s murder as the basis of ‘institutional racism’ in the UK. It was deliberate, politicised and vitriolic racism, popularised from the top down and enforced by the state as a weapon to divide the working class and consolidate white support for the authorities.

Living in Moss Side, Manchester during the 1981 riots, I remember police vans cruising the streets while riot cops beat their batons on the side and chanted ‘Niggers, niggers, niggers – out, out, out!’. A veteran comrade of mine recalls being arrested in east London around the same time while carrying some Workers Against Racism pamphlets, and being repeatedly asked by the police ‘Do you like monkeys?’ and ‘Why do you live in a monkey cage?’ (that is, his largely black council estate in Hackney). After the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham exploded in a riot sparked by police brutality in 1985, in which an officer was killed, the Metropolitan Police arrested hundreds of youths and told the white kids to cooperate because ‘we only want the blacks’. And so it went on. The incompetent police investigation into the Lawrence murder should have come as little surprise.

And the problem went far beyond police ranks. Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher is remembered for her declaration about British culture being ‘swamped’ by immigrants. But there was little more sympathy for the victims of racism among leaders of the Labour Party and trade unions. In 1982, we marched from London to Brighton to call on the TUC to take a stand against racial discrimination and violence. Our message was not well received.

Now look at the contrast with the carnival of official anti-racism around the Lawrence murder verdicts this week. What has brought these remarkable changes about? New Labour home secretary Jack Straw summed up the widespread view that, ‘if Britain has changed for the better in the intervening 19 years… that’s above all down to two extraordinary people, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s parents’. Are we really to believe that the Lawrences have magic powers to transform a nation?

What has happened over the past two decades is that Britain has undergone a major cultural shift as the old politics of nationalism and race have lost their grip on public consciousness. This would have happened whether or not Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists. Indeed, the fact that his killing remains the benchmark for racist violence 19 years on shows how rare such incidents have become.

But here is the thing. The truth is that the less overtly racist British society has become in recent times, the more the authorities have started preaching about the evils of racism and launching new crusades against it. What has altered most is the perception of racism. Where once it was society’s guilty secret, now there is a concerted effort to trawl for and publicise any hint of racially incorrect language or behaviour from the school playground to the football pitch. The less racism is in evidence, the more everything appears to have been racialised. Why?

Official anti-racism has become the beleaguered elites’ political weapon of choice. The old British Establishment used the traditional politics of nationalism, race and empire to assert its authority. Those days are long gone. Instead, today’s political and cultural elites have seized upon the new orthodoxy of official anti-racism to try to give them a sense of moral purpose. Official anti-racism has also become a tool both to demonise and to discipline the white working-class people whom the elites fear and loathe.

The Lawrence case has indeed played a big part in this process, though not in the way widely assumed this week. The key was not so much the murder itself, but the publication of the 1999 Macpherson report into the case, which formally rewrote the state’s doctrine on the politics of race.

Macpherson introduced two landmark changes. First, it introduced a new official definition of a race crime. A racial incident is now ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. Such a sweeping subjective definition of a race crime has inevitably confused debate and fostered the view that racism is everywhere and that ever more laws and initiatives are required to police it.

Second, Macpherson defined the problem of ‘institutional racism’ at the heart of British society, leading to the reorganisation of the police and other public institutions around this assumption. But whereas the Sixties radicals who coined the phrase were talking about the deliberate wielding of power by a racist state apparatus, Macpherson explicitly rejected any such link between institutional racism and the exercise of power. The report stated that the Metropolitan Police was not racist; the problem was more the ‘unwitting words and actions’ of individual officers acting together.

Once racism is reduced to a problem of the individual rather than the state or society, the solution becomes re-education to alter individual attitudes. This is an open invitation to the state to intervene to police people’s words, actions and even thoughts – particularly those of the white working class now seen as the source of the problem. Macpherson even proposed that the use of racist language in your own home should be made an explicit criminal offence. The report led to an explosion of race-based codes of conduct, awareness training and surveillance measures throughout British institutions.

New laws have made it possible to charge people with ‘racially aggravated’ offences, rather than just old-fashioned assault or criminal damage, and sentence them more stiffly on conviction. The law has thus extended into punishing an individual, not just for what he had done, but for what he was assumed to be thinking when he committed an offence - his supposed ‘racial motivation’. This was reflected in the sentencing of those two men for the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Redefined on this individualised basis, racism has been taken up as the cause of the moral crusade. Declaring that you are not a racist has become the bottom line that helps mark you out as one of the ‘right-thinking people’, in the words of one police chief. In an age when many of the old moral certainties have been badly eroded, distancing yourself from racist remarks and following the new etiquette is seen as one of the few ways to draw a clear line between Good and Evil.

That is why every British leader and institution is now so keen to swear their abhorrence of racism, as a pass to the moral high ground that might once have been provided by declaring their belief in God. As the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission boasted after the Lawrence verdicts, racial prejudice is now seen ‘as a secular sin that is not to be tolerated’. And the worst sinners are now deemed to be the white working classes, who must have the new catechism/etiquette of official anti-racism drummed into them at every opportunity. That is why, for example, any hint of racism around football, patronisingly seen as a modern opiate of the masses, is made such a public example of today.

It was against this background that the killing of Stephen Lawrence was belatedly singled out by the authorities as so important. It became more than a murder inquiry; not just a criminal case, but a political cause, as the Met’s deputy commissioner Cressida Dick effectively admitted this week: ‘All murder cases are absolutely dreadful, but this case for reasons you will all understand is extremely important, not just for the Metropolitan Police, but for society at large.’ It had become a way for the state to regain some moral authority around official anti-racism.

I have little sympathy for the two men jailed for the killing of Stephen Lawrence. But for some of us who campaigned against racism on the basis of a belief in freedom, equality and democracy, the wider changes the case has become a vehicle for have not been for the better.

Indeed, some of the most worrying political and legal trends evident in recent years have been promoted in the name of official anti-racism post-Lawrence. These include the rewriting of the law along subjective, arbitrary lines through the redefinition of a race crime; the spread of conformist codes of conduct that police language and thought and suppress open debate; the institutionalisation of mistrust and mutual surveillance; and the notion that people are to be judged on their private attitudes at least as much as their public actions.

In the name of ‘zero tolerance’, the codes of official anti-racism have turned intolerance of offensive views into a ‘value’, even a virtue. Indeed, such is the intolerance of those suspected of harbouring sinful thoughts today that anything can apparently be justified to get them – up to and including, as Brendan O’Neill argues on spiked today, the abolition of such an historic principle of the justice system as the law against double jeopardy. This is the modern elite’s version of the old corrupt copper’s mantra – if they’re wrong’uns, anything goes to get them.

On spiked, and even before that in LM magazine, we have argued from the start that there is no benefit for those who believe in freedom in the phoney moral crusade of official anti-racism launched around the Lawrence case. As I wrote here 10 years ago, ‘It is the new thought police, rather than the old racist ones, who are running riot through Britain today’. The exploitation of the Lawrence verdict this week confirms that official anti-racism is now every bit as authoritarian and intolerant as the state racism of old.

Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11947/

Next Birmingham Salon. Wednesday 8 Feb 2012

Hear podcasts of previous salons on the Podcasts page

The Sanitised City: How public is public space?

Wednesday 8 February

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Introduced by

Alastair Donald is associate director of the Future Cities Project, and co-editor of The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs (Pluto 2011). He is an urban designer, researching mobility and space at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge.

Nikki Pugh works in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology. She is primarily interested in issues around interaction: how we interact with spaces and landscapes and, in supporting exploration and criticism. She is co-author of the 'Splacist Manifesto'.

For all the talk of reigning back the state, binning the red tape, and letting the Big Society emerge, the explosion of rules and regulations, bans and behavioural codes, shows no sign of abating under the Coalition. The securitised, commercialised and homogenised centres that dominate British cities have been to the fore in the urban discussion in recent years.

Privatisation, in the form of shopping malls or managed developments such as Brindley Place, are said to create ‘pseudo public spaces’, what one commentator describes as ‘pacification by cappuccino’; others point to the eviction notices pinned to tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral as showing that the interests of the Corporation prevail over the freedom of the people.

But is this picture overly simplistic? After all, six out of ten people would like to see more CCTV cameras in their local area, suggesting support for the idea that the private space of the individual should be opened up to greater public scrutiny. Where public space might once have operated on the basis of trust, today suspicion of the autonomous citizen seems to have become acceptable - and even encouraged. Behaving responsibly – no loitering, no drinking, no leafleting, no photography – is often justified on the grounds of safeguarding the public from unsolicited attention or interaction.

So what could bring our sanitised cities back to life? What represents acceptable behaviour, and who should decide and how? Is the way forward to be found in better design and new models of ownership? As from Cairo to Tunis and from Athens to Madrid, civic space has recently been thrust back into the spotlight, this session asks ‘what is public space?

All Welcome

£5 on the door (waged) or a donation of your choice if you're not.

Institute of Ideas Xmas lecture 'It's Christmas in Euroland' podcast

with:
Phil Mullan: economist; business transformation director, Easynet Global Services; author The Imaginary Time Bomb

Simon Nixon: European editor, Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column; author, The Credit Crunch: how safe is your money?

Mark Seddon: writer and broadcaster; author, Standing for Something: life in the awkward squad
Podcast: Christmas in Euroland

Phil Mullan's article on his speech:
Christmas is a time we wish for things. Sometimes, as many a ‘Dear Santa’ letter will testify, these wishes can seem, at least at first, a little outlandish, maybe even utopian. So in good seasonal tradition, here is mine: my wish is for a speedy decision to dissolve the Euro, and for this to happen as part of a political, democratically infused campaign for a stronger, united Europe.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11904/

The Elizabethans worried they were running out of wood

I thought this was a really inspiring article by Colin McInnes, Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Strathclyde. He writes at Perpetual Motion.

"Fossil fuels represent energy which is not of our time; they represent energy from the sun stored in compacted dead plant matter. But nuclear fuels represent energy which is not of our place. Their immense energy density, about a million times greater than fossil fuels, comes from the final moments of collapse of ancient stars which fused lighter elements into uranium and thorium. Even the prophet of ‘peak oil’, M King Hubbert, a man beloved of growth sceptics, cleverly recognised that while fossil-fuel use will no doubt ultimately peak, nuclear fuels are essentially forever, because they are so energy dense.

Let’s be clear: there is no shortage of high-grade, carbon-free energy to deliver a future of shared prosperity. But we need the will, ambition and inventiveness to exploit it. We also need to recognise that we have only scratched the surface of nuclear energy. Even modern light-water reactors are woefully inefficient at turning the energy of collapsing stars stored in nuclear fuels into useful work. But through future innovation, we can tap almost all of that clean, compact energy considerately provided by nature."

Read on..  spiked-online.com

R.I.P. Dobie Gray

Niall Crowley Who’s in the ‘In Crowd’ these days? The late US soul singer Dobie Gray provided the theme tune for uppity working-class kids in 1960s Britain.

Dobie Gray, the US soul singer who provided the theme tune for a new generation of uppity British working-class youth in the 1960s, has died. Gray’s 1965 underground dance hit, ‘The “In” Crowd’, fitted like a bespoke Italian suit for the swanky and urbane kids who had even the upper classes chasing their shirt tails. Future-oriented and cosmopolitan, with little time for the outmoded conventions and deference that had choked the country for so long, they were the ‘in’ crowd.


http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11877/

My Spiked article on antibiotic use in agriculture

Time for an injection of common sense
Groups opposed to modern agriculture are using scare stories to try to have antibiotics banned on farms.

‘A world without effective antibiotics is a terrifying but real prospect. Now, the situation is so acute that the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Margaret Chan, has warned of “a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and once again, kill unabated”... [O]ver-use of antibiotics in factory farming, especially at low doses over several days, is contributing to the huge threat of a world without effective cures for bacterial infections.’

So said Compassion in World Farming, launching a report last month with two other campaign groups, the Soil Association and Sustain. The report, Case Study of a Health Crisis is part of an ‘Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics’. But does factory farming really threaten human health?

The emergence of antibiotic resistance as a serious problem in human medicine has prompted concerns about the public health implications of antibiotic use in agriculture. Opponents of intensive agriculture argue that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics in the guts of animals that are exposed to routine antibiotic use. Then, humans ingest these bacteria through the consumption of animal products and by drinking water contaminated by ‘run-off’ from factory farms. But is there a basis for these fears?

Antibiotics have been used for over 40 years on farms for three main purposes: to treat identified illnesses; to prevent illness; and to increase growth rates. The use of antibiotics as growth promoters added to animal feed was banned in the European Union, against the advice of the EU’s own Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition, in January 2006. In a press release from the European Parliament in October, it was argued that the EU should also phase out the pre-emptive ‘prophylactic’ use of antibiotics, too. MEPs agreed that active ingredients used in veterinary and human medicines should be kept as separate as possible to reduce risks of resistance transferring between animals and humans.

Antibiotics are sometimes used to prevent diseases that might occur in a herd or group of animals. In situations where the proportion of animals suffering a disease during a defined period reaches a threshold, all animals in the herd are treated, as the probability of most or all of the animals getting infected is high. However, in animals as in humans, a significant proportion of those treated for infectious disease would recover without antibiotics, so it could be deemed that such use is unnecessary. But does this application of antibiotics create resistance?

According to scientists from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, there is ‘no scientific study linking antibiotic use in food-animal production with antibiotic resistance’. The most thorough study on this topic, from the Journal of Risk Analysis in 2008, concluded that the risk of a human experiencing an infection from antibiotic-resistant bacteria because cattle were fed antibiotics is one in 608million, which means it is over 2,000 times less likely than being struck by lightning.

There is, however, ample evidence to suggest that bacteria - including resistant strains - enter a farm from many different sources and that transmission of resistant bacteria may occur even when livestock are not being given antibiotics. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, humans may acquire resistant infections, via livestock, even if antibiotics are not given to those animals. Epidemiological studies have identified other risk factors for infections in humans, including contact with their own pet dogs and cats. These animals may be treated with antibiotics but are rarely tested as potential sources of human infection.

There is also evidence that the removal of antibiotics from veterinary medicine would cause welfare problems. Recent analysis of antibiotic use on farms in Denmark, where a voluntary ban on the use of antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs) was instituted in 1998, reports that antibiotics are now being used sparingly. Farmers and veterinarians must now wait until animals are exhibiting clear signs of illness before treatment is applied. However, this has led to higher doses of antibiotics being used overall. The Denmark ban led to an increase in diarrhoea in pigs and an increase in deaths by more than 20 per cent according to the World Health Organisation.

It is important to understand that the antibiotics used to prevent disease in animals are not used to treat humans. However, the antibiotics used to treat disease amongst animals are also used to treat humans. The ban actually increases the use of antibiotics that are also used in human medicine. Since the Danish ban, antimicrobial use has increased by nearly 110 per cent due to higher dosages being required to treat, rather than prevent, disease.

Since the antibiotic ban was introduced pig farmers in Denmark have begun utilising zinc to help control diarrhoea in hogs. Ironically, it is highly likely that this may be encouraging the incidence of the so-called ‘hospital superbug’, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Most importantly, WHO stated in 2002 that there had been no evidence of improved public health since the ban. In fact, resistant salmonella in humans has increased and Denmark had its largest outbreak of MRSA in 2008.

The Danish ban may have also contributed to a decrease in the number of farms in Denmark from nearly 25,000 in 1995 to fewer than 10,000 in 2005. Farmers, who were already finding it difficult to make a living, faced the increased cost of cattle lost to illnesses that, in the past, would have been saved by using antibiotics. Antibiotics reduce suffering and distress and speed recovery, and since an animal cannot be allowed to suffer the only alternative is to kill it.

Given that there have been few studies into the link between antibiotic resistance and agricultural use, and that these studies have found no evidence of a link, we might ask what all the fuss is about? But when it comes to modern, highly productive and safe farming methods, evidence is not important to groups - like the disingenuously named Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics - who would apparently rather we used Victorian-era methods for food production. The same evidence phobia seems to have afflicted EU bureaucrats and faceless Euro MPs trying to find some connection with the public by implementing ‘popular’ but counterproductive policies.

Jason Smith is convenor of the Birmingham Salon.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11870/