EcoLogics

In the wake of the news about Alan Johnson’s decision to promote xenophobia in the UK, EcoLogics suggests that the neo-Nazis have much to learn from the New Labour politicians. The trick, Nick, is to appeal to ‘common sense’, and to an apparent ‘common ground’, one that makes ‘us’ the normal, the victims, and ‘them’ the abnormal, the perpetrators: say, as Jack Straw did, that you find it difficult to talk to women who are wearing a veil; or say, like Johnson has just done, that ‘There are communities which have been disproportionately affected by immigration, where people have legitimate concerns about the strain that the growth in the local population has placed on jobs and services’.

And New Labour claims to be outraged over the rise of the BNP? As noted by this blog in earlier posts, the rise of neo-Nazi politics in the UK is clearly linked to the racism and xenophobia of New Labour itself.

New Labour cannot evade responsibility for the rise in the popularity of the BNP. Amongst New Labour politicians, Jack Straw is perhaps the man who has most blatantly dipped his political spoon into the BNP’s broth of racist and xenophobic hatred; his infamous, easy go at women who wear veils was a textbook example of the kind of intervention that aids and abets ethnocentrism of an extremist kind. Almost overnight, some of the women most likely to be abused in the UK were transformed by Straw into ‘perpetrators’ of multiculturalism.

Straw is also the éminence grise behind Britain’s scandalous libel laws. And as if that weren’t enough, just yesterday it was reported that Straw has been caught out trying to sneak through a new law that makes it possible for the government to conduct secret inquests.

In this context, it was contradictory, to say the least, to hear that New Labour’s most right-handed man would be in charge of ’standing up’ to the neo-nazis during the BBC’s Nick Griffin Comes to Question Time special. Alas, interviewees on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programe reported that Straw looked distinctly uncomfortable in that role; he would do, given his politics.

EcoLogics is happy to point readers in the direction of two excellent pieces by commentators who tell the Jack Straw story like it is.

The first, by Gary Young, sets the scene with a piece that appears, lamentably, in Peter Mandelson’s rag, better known as The Guardian. But a friend has forwarded it and here is an excerpt (perhaps Young might find another paper to write in!):

The issue of whether the BNP should be given this kind of airtime has been debated extensively elsewhere in these pages. But there is little doubt that once the BNP is on Question Time, Jack Straw – or indeed anyone in the New Labour hierarchy – is in no position to take the fight to it. The same is true for most of the rest of the British political establishment that will be represented on the panel – they have either actively colluded or passively acquiesced in the political trajectory of the past decade. [...] But it is no accident that this happened on New Labour’s watch and no small irony that Jack Straw should set himself up as Griffin’s opponent.[...] Economically, its neoliberal policies have resulted in growing insecurity, rising unemployment, child poverty and inequality that have alienated the poor and made the middle class feel vulnerable. Politically, its lies over the war, stewardship of the expenses scandal and internal bickering have produced widespread cynicism with our political culture. The ramifications of its role in the war on terror in general, and Iraq in particular, were to elevate fear of a racialised “other” to a matter of life and death at home. “Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack,” explains Arjun Appadurai, in Fear of Small Numbers. “Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.”

From Gary Young’s  ‘When you watch the BNP on TV, just remember: Jack Straw started all this’ in The Guardian.

The one thing we can be sure Mr Straw believes in is Mr Straw. His ambition is unquenchable. When his one serious mistake (deflecting transatlantic glory from Mr Tony Blair by cuddling up to Condi Rice) cost him the Foreign Office, he accepted humiliating demotion just to stay in the game. His transfer of allegiance from Blair to Brown, whose leadership “campaign” he managed (and hats off for winning that one), was comical in its fervency. Even now, be sure that he is scheming to position himself as the Jim Hacker compromise candidate should Labour somehow locate the energy required to ditch the PM.[...]Tragically, there would be worse electoral choices. …he is adept at promoting an image of calmly authoritative blandness, hence his comparative popularity, and a grandmaster of televisual smoothness. He is as slimy as an oil slick, and always quick to move on once he’s coated the vulnerable birdies with filthy tar.

Updated 23 October 2009 (scroll down to see update)

A brief post about the BBC Radio 4’s ‘News at One’ programme, heard yesterday, 20 October 2009. The programme focused on the news that a group of retired British generals have had a go at the BNP (without actually naming it) for ‘seeking to hijack the symbols of the armed forces and their history’. Martha Kearney, the BBC anchor,  interviewed Simon Weston, the renowned Falkland War veteran, who joined the generals in condemning the BNP; and then she interviewed Nick Griffin himself.

Two thoughts: first, it was apparent that the news piece was designed to support the armed forces’ position, and to undermine the BNP’s. This blogger has seldom witnessed such a manifest effort on the part of the BBC to coach one side, and to attack the other. While the BNP is a neo-fascist organisation and deserves to be condemned, the interview threw up into the starkest relief the manner in which the BBC’s alleged codes of impartiality are there to be used and abused, pretty much at will. How to reconcile the mentioned codes (see EcoLogics’ earlier analysis of these codes in The BBC, New Labour & the BNP) with the extraordinarily one-sided interviewing technique?

The point is not to defend the BNP, but to suggest that this has long been a style of interview employed by the BBC against anyone whom its journalists or editors regarded as being an ‘enemy of the state’. The interview showed just how manipulative the claims to impartiality can be, and how easy it is to abuse them.

The second thought concerns Nick Griffin’s performance. On one level, it certainly seemed to live up to the claim that Griffin/BNP have acquired a certain moderation when it comes to expressing racist views. Martha Kearney repeatedly tried to get Griffin to voice the racism for which the BNP is infamous, but more often than not, Griffin managed to side-step the inquisitorial blows. For example, when pressed on the matter of deporting ‘foreign’ members of the armed forces who committed crimes, Griffin appeared to soften the BNP’s stance, suggesting that if criminal behaviour occurred as a result of a lack of support for war veterans, this would have to be ‘taken into account’. Such deft discursive manoeuvres were cleverly interspersed with populist stances, such as the suggestion that Britain should immediately exit the war in Afghanistan, a war that had ‘nothing to do with us’, and involved sending poorly equipped men into battle.

However, when you contrast Griffin’s public stance with the information that has leaked out about the BNP’s views in the privacy of their own meetings (or indeed on the BBC’s own earlier interview on Radio 1), it becomes apparent that, more than having moderated his views,  Griffin has learned to hide the views, and to do so by appealing to a mixture of a perceived common sense, and a ‘centre ground’.

This being true, we can say that Griffin has learned to do what the Tories and New Labour have been doing for decades. No wonder both parties are worried; the fascists are learning, and so becoming a part of, the UK’s political culture.

Update 23 October 2009: after the infamous BBC Question Time

BBC’s handling of the Question Time episode in which Griffin appeared more than confirmed the above analysis. What a travesty of alleged impartiality: one moment the BBC was saying it had to include Griffin in the programme thanks to impartiality rules, and the next it was organising a veritable kangaroo court against Griffin. And today the establishment is congratulating itself….

Amid the growing controversy surrounding the possible, indeed likely appearance of the neo-fascist BNP on the BBC’s Question Time this Thursday, two different, but inter-related issues have scarcely been raised by the Westminster commentariat.

The first is New Labour’s role in aiding and abetting the rise in the popularity of the BNP. New Labour, along with the Murdochs and the Rothmeres, is largely to blame for this phenomenon. First, it has so lied to, and deceived its former political base—British working men and women—that it has generated a disillusion and frustration with mainstream politics that is finding an outlet in the hateful BNP. The ‘intense relaxation’ of figures such as Peter Mandelson about the ‘filthy rich’ is in direct proportion to the anger that is being expressed by former Labour voters. Some have responded by going to the BNP; next spring many of the rest will vote for David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s PPP, the new Tory ‘People’s Progressive Party’.

While this aspect is key, it is not enough in itself; the second factor has been the xenophobia which New Labour politicians like Hazel Blears, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and other figures on New Labour’s increasingly far right leadership have promoted by talking up the ‘Islamist threat’ and by promoting anti-immigrant legislation. New Labour has, in this sense, joined the ranks of tabloid papers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail in scapegoating foreigners for Britain’s own social malaise. Even Gordon Brown has dipped his political spoon into this broth, claiming as he did in 2007 that ‘British jobs are for British workers’.

In this context, for New Labour to be suggest that the BNP should be excluded from national television is pathetic. The calls dissimulate the party’s own stance on immigration, and make a mockery of its allegedly progressive social credentials.

The BBC is playing no less sinister a role in the entire process. Let’s be very clear: the corporation has never been unbiased. Talk of impartiality is no more—and no less—than a convenient fiction which has served to maintain a degree aperture in the corporation’s coverage of a variety of events—a whisker of pluralism that, as this blogger has suggested before, is certainly better than the kind of Fox News society achieved in the United States by the Murdoch family. But let us not believe for a moment that this is tantamount to the impartiality that the BBC pretends to adhere to. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to investigate the role of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s Director General, vis-a-vis the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In this case we find a useful example of the limits of the liberal model of journalism. (For a more detailed critique, EcoLogics includes below an excerpt of an analysis published in 2007, in the post on the British judge, Stephen Sedley, who tried to support the New Labour government’s plans to introduce a universal DNA database.)

No, what we have to fear is not so much the appearance of the BNP on television, as the fact that it will do so in a broadcasting system which has already shown a predisposition to tolerate both manifest and subtle forms of racism. If you missed the controversy surrounding an earlier appearance of the BNP on Radio 1, then read up on it to find out what is likely to happen, if not now, then in the medium term in a broadcasting system that has become subservient to the forces of neoliberalism—the same ones that have contributed, and still are contributing to the renewal of fascism in the UK, and beyond.

From an earlier post, a critique of the BBC’s claims of impartiality:

‘The BBC’s editorial guidelines suggest that the BBC is committed to impartiality. According to the BBC, this means that, amongst other things, the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’; to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented’; to ‘produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so’; to ‘explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may also require a right of reply’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Indeed, the BBC goes so far as to say that its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(8).

These guidelines reflect the BBC’s commitment to what might be described as a traditional discourse on the nature of journalism. A good journalist, or rather the news that s/he produces, is accurate, balanced, includes where appropriate a diversity of views, and does so in a manner that is not prejudiced by any bias, or by the personal views of the journalist.

While this discourse has been comprehensively critiqued by a number of scholars (see for example, Stuart Allan’s News Culture), there is still much to be said for it; we have only to consider the alternative posed by Fox News (9) to realise how vitally important it is to try to produce impartial, or something like impartial accounts, in news reporting.

The problem is that editorial guidelines such as the BBC’s are of course no guarantee of impartiality—for the BBC, or for any other news organisation. On the one hand, and staying within the logic of the guidelines, journalism is always susceptible to external manipulation, to mistakes or bias incurred thanks to the pressures of time or the limitations of space, and indeed to ‘internal’ manipulation by ‘biased’ journalists. From a more critical perspective, the guidelines are based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Modern societies and the issues that emerge in them tend to be so complex that there may well be far more perspectives than a journalist can ever know, understand, or report in any given case or subject. To be sure, the finite nature of a journalist’s, or indeed of a team of journalists’ knowledge means that s/he/they will necessarily bring to bear a certain perspective to whatever aspects they do manage to cover. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a piece, the political and economic interests of the news organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists must work to produce news.

This post is not the place to engage in a detailed critique of journalistic conventions. It must suffice to suggest that, in practice, the aforementioned constraints force journalists to be selective, and thereby reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Those that they do choose will reflect, however indirectly, the ‘biases’ of their own knowledge and/or experience. Put differently, journalists’ representations will always exclude or misrepresent at least some views or perspectives.”

When this blog published a brief post, ‘In praise of Obama’, several fellow wordpress.com users sent comments almost before I’d dotted the last i and crossed last t. The comments were all quite polite, but conveyed more or less the same message: EcoLogics had got its facts wrong, there was nothing racist about the Cambridge policeman’s actions in Professor Henry Louis Gates’ home.

Yesterday another event made headlines which poses much the same issues raised by the Gates affair. EcoLogics will be posting a detailed analysis of this matter soon, but in the meantime, here is a very brief summary of what happened.

1. On August 10, Niall Ferguson published an op-ed piece in the Financial Times that began as follows: ‘President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job.’

2. It seems that a number of people wrote to the FT.com website denouncing the comparison, and one or two supported it. But the matter became an ‘affair célèbre’ when at least two well-known columnists took up the issue: Paul Krugman, in his nytimes.com blog, and James Fallows, in his Atlantic column. If readers follow the links, they will be able to see each writer’s argument for themselves.

3. Ferguson was evidently enraged by the criticism, and wrote to Krugman and Fallows enjoining them to publish what he represented as a refutation by none other than Henry Louis Gates himself:

‘As you both took exception to my comparison of the President with Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done so [note: in fact, only Fallows suggested that Ferguson should ‘have a beer’ with Gates]. He has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of African-American Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me as follows:

“None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of the racially-questionable caricatures Disney used. Felix’s blackness, like Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. … You are safe on this one.”’

You can read Krugman’s rejoinder here, and Fallows’ here. To see Ferguson’s defence, you may wish to read his account in the Huffington Post.

EcoLogics is interested in various aspects of this debate.

The first point, which was raised by Krugman in his first post, is how the Financial Times allowed the piece to be published in the first place. Despite the best efforts of some right wing professors and commentators, we still live in a society that has social codes that are meant to suppress sexist, racist, and other ideological forms of expression. In the wake of Ferguson’s piece, it would appear that the editors of the Financial Times have effectively thrown down the gauntlet. If the FT has allowed this one to pass, then in principle nothing should prevent columnists from beginning articles with comments such as the one offered as a counter-example by Fallows: ‘”Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable.”‘

Perhaps the reason why Fallows offered this example is because most people don’t have a vocabulary with which to explain why or how Ferguson’s article might be, indeed should be regarded as being racist—or as this blogger would put it, as being a text that may well provoke racism. And indeed the second point to be made is that, in the absence of a critical vocabulary, those who denounce racism may be quite easily browbeaten into silence (which is what Ferguson unwisely and ineffectually attempted to do to Krugman and to Fallows) or provoked into statements which leave them looking like the proverbial bull in a china shop (Krugman avoided this too when he neatly returned the ball to Ferguson by noting that it had never occurred to him that Felix the Cat was Afro-American).

The third point is to express surprise that Gates is reportedly backing Ferguson up. We probably haven’t heard the end of this story. On the one hand, Fallows’ account of the differendum notes that Ferguson initially back-tracked on his claim that Gates had ‘rubbished’ any suggestion that the article was racist—an accusation that was not actually made by either Krugman or Fallows. On the other hand, this blogger would be very interested to read what if anything has been left out of the Gates’ quote: note the ‘…’ between ‘not a skin color’ and ‘You are safe on this one.’

Gates’ supposed ‘all clear’ is nonetheless surprising because there can be little doubt that the comparison was indeed racist, in the sense that it focused attention on Obama’s ‘race’. However, it did so in a manner that, in the present ideological climate, can apparently be plausibly denied. In the same way that the policeman tried to argue that Gates’ arrest was grounded in Gates’ own behaviour, Ferguson could, and did suggest that all he was saying is that both Felix the Cat and Obama are black: ‘As for the word “black”, it’s the same one used by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, among others.’

This raises the question: how does one describe and evaluate statements such as Ferguson’s, in a way that refutes what might be described, in honour of eponymous professor, as the ‘Ferguson Defence’? Stay tuned for an analysis

This blog has been very critical of the Obama administration. The signs are that the administration, if not the man himself, is a Clinton Mk II. As such, it will eventually pave the way for another Bush-like figure; to be sure, it’s already engaging in some rather Bush-like actions itself.

Political realists will no doubt argue that Obama faces a formidable opposition, and that he has to make concessions. This blogger believes that it’s actually a rerun of what happened when New Labour came to power in the UK: the new government was so scared of the Tories (or of their press) that it tried to be more Tory than the Tories. In the end, they succeeded. (Actually, New Labour were Tories from the start, but that’s another story.)

That said, there is at least one thing that Obama has done which does show political courage: he’s come out and condemned the actions of the police that wrongly arrested Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. Obama could have kept quiet, but he didn’t—three cheers for his willingness to denounce this episode, and not just ‘racism in general’. For anyone who thinks that the election of Obama signals the end of institutional racism, the events in Cambridge, MA are a grim reminder that it remains a reality in the U.S., as in the U.K.

Anyone who wants to find out how it is that Nepalese soldiers came to be employed in segregated units of the British Army could do worse than have a read of the Wikipedia entry on the concept of ‘Martial Race’. The reader may also wish to peruse the Wiki on the Brigade of Gurkas, the term used by the British Army to refer to what is, as far as EcoLogics knows, the only explicitly racialised military unit in any Western, industrialised country. (Consider the uproar that there would be if the U.S. were to have, say, a ‘Brigade of Guambianos’, named after an aboriginal group in Colombia.) Where the first Wiki explains the racist origins of the brigade, the second entry reveals the manner in which Gurkhas have been employed over the last two centuries or so to fight many of the battles that the rest of the British Army could not, or did not see fit to fight itself. On more than one occasion, and as recently as the 1960s, the battles in question included attacks designed to suppress revolts against British colonial rule. From this perspective, the existence of the Brigade reflects a history of institutional racism.

As is frequently the case with institutional racism, a number of arguments might be deployed to dissimulate the racism. EcoLogics can imagine, for example, that the policy’s apologists might argue that the Gurkha soldiers actually want to fight in separate units. Another argument might suggest that even if the units are the outcome of a history of racism, there is no such racism today. In the end, the best evidence that institutional racism continues to exist is found in New Labour’s efforts—like those of successive Conservative governments before it—to exclude the Gurkhas from the automatic right to settle in the country that they’ve fought for.

It was marvellous to see how the tenacity of a movement fronted by Joanna Lumley and Nick Clegg unsettled, however temporarily, a policy that is centuries old. It was also disgusting to see how David Cameron tried to hijack, for party political gain, a campaign that Conservative governments have opposed in the past, and will almost certainly oppose once again in future. Anyone watching the BBC online video could be forgiven for thinking that it was actually Cameron who led the process. How significant, as part of this process, that whereas the camera remains in a three-shot throughout the duration of Clegg’s statement, it zooms in on Cameron when the Conservative Party leader speaks. Does anyone at the BBC look into these kinds of asymmetries?

UPDATE May 25, 2009: The New Labour u-turn over this matter is very welcome. But it says a lot about British politics that it took a celebrity like Lumley to humiliate the Brown government, and to force the change.