Do not legitimise the BNP

Every day at the moment I’m hearing something or other about the BNP (British National Party). Just the fact of the increased airtime they are being given by the BBC and other media is fucking scary because I’ve heard this little saying about publicity…

And also, it’s not even that bad publicity. See for example this article in the New Statesman, the comment thread of which has been hijacked by BNP supporters congratulating the writers of the article for the ‘fair’ and ‘well-balanced’ reporting. That ought to suggest something’s wrong. Notice how the authors say that the party has “worked hard to develop a full manifesto of policies” and then proceeds to list a bunch of things I’m sure we all want (ie “more money for the NHS”), to show how they’re not just about anti-immigration and racism. Why provide a platform to legitimise them in this way?

Also, this article from the BBC (h/t @blacklooks) reports a tirade of repulsive statements by Nick Griffin and BNP policies, without any significant rebuttal as to why the hate they’re spouting is wrong. This report can’t even hide behind the defense of ‘balanced reporting’, it’s lazy journalism which basically provides a free space for Griffin to spew out his disgusting views to a mass audience. I thought the BBC might have some, you know, anti-racist policies?

So whatever your thoughts about the failure of the electoral system & the democratic process etc etc, if you have the right to vote I hope you will exercise it on 4th June. Even if I don’t like the general approach of the New Stateman article, the concluding paragraph is pretty clear:

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN) sets a worrying precedent in France. Founded in 1972, the FN was dismissed as a fringe movement for a decade. But after gains in local elections around Paris, the FN achieved a shock success in the 1984 European elections, obtaining ten seats and transforming its electoral prospects. In the next legislative elections, the party increased its vote from 44,000 to 2.7 million, nearly 10 per cent of the vote. It has been a significant force in French politics ever since. Those who dismiss Griffin’s BNP would do well to remember that no one in France took Le Pen seriously in the early 1980s. Twenty years later he was competing with Jacques Chirac for the French presidency.

Let’s not allow this happen.

PS: These postal workers have got the right idea!

History, context & power…

I highly recommend watching this video of part of a lecture by Dr. Sunera Thobani. She makes a helluva lot of sense!

The Gurkhas, Joanna Lumley and colonial nostalgia

Joanna Lumley’s public humiliation of immigration minister Phil Woolas was classic and I had a good laugh watching that, I really did. I mean, she actually railroaded him into committing the ultimate politician’s faux pas of agreeing to change policy in front of hundreds of cameras. She’s managed to subvert the political process and run rings around senior ministers, fawning with respect for the prime minister in her over-the-top posh demeanour but at the same time nailing him to the wall (I can’t help but wonder if its actually a really clever parody performance). Because of these bold media and publicity savvy tactics I think the case is basically settled (I hope? But who knows seeing as there seems to be no accountability whatsoever from government) 

But all this media coverage in the last few days of the gurkha veterans’ struggle to gain the right live in the UK has got me thinking about a number of things…

One is about the way the dominant discourse on immigration divides people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants, worthy and unworthy. Sokari commented on my post about the Strangers into Citizens campaign that a problem with this campaign is that it sets one group of immigrants up against another. This happens all the time (see commenter on the same post who argued that “there are many more eligible people in the line than illegals” [sic]) and it is dangerous, and a strategy which we must challenge when campaigning for people’s rights to migrate.

Migration is a human right. When people talk about who is more worthy of entering a certain country like it’s common sense and somehow natural, they are doing their bit to uphold a racist system which has its roots in European imperialism.

Another troubling point is how the case of the gurkhas itself is so deeply bound up in imperialist ideologies. What we appear to be currently witnessing in the press is a heavy dose of imperialist nostalgia. The gurkha soldiers have truly been judged as good immigrants . Because they were soldiers. Because they fought for the queen. Because they defended the British Empire.

Which leads me on to wondering about Joanna Lumley’s role in all of this. Predictably the story has become all about her. The soft-spoken yet determined, upper class, benevolent white woman crusader, stepping in to save the day. In an interview on the news I saw yesterday she gushed about how lovely the gurkhas are and how they love the queen. She’s playing right into the idea that colonisation was a benevolent project to spread British values and manners (which she epitomises so well), gratefully received by the colonial ’subjects’. In the media frenzy over the last few days I have rarely seen a space made for the men to speak for themselves, Lumley has become the official speaker for them.

If your campaign is supported by Boris Johnson you may want to have a rethink

The Strangers Into Citizens campaign are riding high on the publicity garnered from Boris Johnson’s support for their call for a one-off immigration amnesty for undocumented people living in the UK. I understand that it makes sense to publicise this fact in terms of getting publicity and support from certain sectors from where you might not have expected it, but support from that despicable man immediately raised the alarm bells for me. So I went to take a closer look at their website.

First off, I found the quote from Johnson. Apparently this is what he said:

Where people have been here a long time and have no prospect of being able to be sent back then an amnesty could be considered so that they can pay taxes and legally contribute to the British economy.

(emphasis mine) Yes, very supportive of the rights of migrants that, isn’t it? This is the best they could find? This is the quote they are using on their website to promote Johnson’s support? What kind of message does this send out about the rights of migrants to be here? Is this campaign just about ‘oh well we can’t seem to get rid of them so lets at least make them pay taxes’??

Don’t get me wrong, I am in favour of an amnesty. But this call does not go anywhere far enough. For one, it seems very conditional and with strings attached. Specifically:

Those who have been here for 4 or more years should be admitted to a 2-year pathway to full legal rights (“leave to remain”) during which they work legally and demonstrate their contribution to UK economy and society. After that 2-year period, subject to knowledge of English and employer and community references, they would be granted permanent leave to remain.

So no right to study then? Or being disabled or caring for children or otherwise unable to work? Are those not the kind of citizens the campaign coalition has in mind?

But but but… in the end, is a campaign such as this still be a good thing? Or are its supporters only motivated by the benefits of getting rid of the immigration backlog so that the government can start anew with a blank slate and even more stringent and inhumane controls?

This is not enough

I tend to listen more than I speak. In blog terms this means I don’t post very often. It also means since I posted a few months ago saying that I would be a better ally to trans* people, I haven’t posted anything on the subject, which is pretty shameful really.

But I have been trying to educate myself. I will be honest and say I had not even given trans* rights issues much thought until last year, when a combination of attending the Feminist Activist Forum’s trans and intersex learning exchange last summer and then beginning to read blogs and while  exploring the worlds of online feminism realising that a lot of it is deeply transphobic and thinking, fuck, how can this be ok and acceptable to so many people in 2009?? 

Before that trans issues in relation to feminism generally only surfaced in my life on occassional threads on various feminist mailing lists about whether events like Reclaim the Night (RTN) and Million Women Rise (MWR) excluded trans women, where my response was generally – how can they be? How can that possibly be justified? And there was my short lived stint on one particular mailing list for a well-known feminist group where my emails arguing for trans women’s rights to feminist spaces and for suggesting that such a thing as ‘transphobia’ actually exists, were met with accusations of entryist politics (with my evil queer politics) and not being a feminist at all (which is pretty tame really, compared to the kind of accusations and attacks trans feminists have to put up with all the time).

I guess I just hadn’t seen what the big deal was, my cis privilege allowing me to not notice this. To me it seemed (and still does) common sense that trans women should be included in women only spaces. I hadn’t realised quite how strongly some feminists consistently argue for the exclusion of trans women, or at least had my eyes open to it. But last year I did and I was pretty fucking disgraced to see such hatred spewed out from women who identify as feminists. Women who I am supposed to share a political outlook with. But hell no we don’t.

First of all (and there’s so much more, but I’m starting here) what is this ambivalence about whether trans women are welcome at marches to end violence against women? Why the fuck shouldn’t they be? They are women. They experience violence. End of. There have been emails from both MWR and RTN organisers, in response to specific requests, saying that they are trans inclusive (although the RTN London’s response is hardly convincing, saying only that they see no need to define ‘women’), but neither have been prepared to come out publicly on the publicity material to say they are. This is not good enough. This is not taking a stand on violence against trans women and perpetuates the notion that only cis women matter.

Refusing to make a clear statement sends out a strong signal that trans women are not welcome. Over and over again people have said, you must make it clear on the publicity what ‘women only’ means, because there is such a long history of transphobia in feminist organising that without it ‘women only’ is taken to mean ‘women-born-women only’. I have actually never been to a RTN march, but my distancing from it has been because of accusations in the past of the racism inherent in predominantly-white women marches through poor and/or majority black neighbourhoods calling for ‘better policing’, as well as the more recent London incarnation of RTN making a ritual of stopping off to shout outside strip clubs, which I figure would be pretty alienating for the women working there. And speaking of RTN London specifically, I now think they will never make their ’support’ for trans women’s rights to march explicit. Because it doesn’t exist.

MWR on the other hand, I am more ambivalent about. They are a new coalition and may have been ignorant of the need to make trans women specifically welcome. I don’t know that though, this is only speculation. I may be wrong and maybe they don’t want to listen. I mean, even if the publicity was printed, they could obviously have put something on their website when requested, which suggests there may have been resistance within the collective if it was discussed. But as someone who has been ignorant myself of transphobia rampant in feminist communities until so recently, at this point I am willing to give them another chance. And later this year when they start meeting again to plan the next march, I will be contacting them to request that their trans positive policy is clearly available on all their publicity. I will post on here then, and hope that lots of other cisgender feminists will do the same. After all it shouldn’t be left to trans women to do this, as sadly it pretty much seemed to be this year.

Required watching: Angela Davis

Do you have an hour to spare? Then watch this:

Got another hour? Then watch this too:

Racism & white privilege & UK feminism

So I wrote this article for the F-word website….

Yarl’s Wood demo next Sat – 21 March

By the way, I hope everyone who can be is planning on being here next week:

London NoBorders, Campaign Against Immigration Controls, SOAS Detainee Support Group, No-one is Illegal, Campaign To Stop Arbitrary Detention at Yarl’s Wood, Campaign to Close Campsfield, Legal Action for Women, All African Women’s Group and Barbed Wire Britain Network to End Detention call:

For An End to Immigration Detention

Saturday 21st March 2009 Gather 11.30am at Bedford Town Centre to march from Bedford to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre, to demonstrate between 12.30 and 2pm.

Mental health and the recession

I’m still thinking on this one:

Fears of a depression and an anxiety epidemic, caused by the recession, are forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing  unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown. Sufferers will be referred to psychotherapists for expert counselling via an advice network linking Jobcentres, doctors’ surgeries and a new NHS Direct hotline.

Under the plan, which will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year.

The moves, to be unveiled by health secretary Alan Johnson and work and pensions secretary James Purnell today, reflect growing anxiety in government that there will be a surge of people who become mentally ill and, as a result, could find themselves unemployed for the long term.

I say I’m still thinking, because I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. On the one hand of course it can only be a good thing that they are doing something substantial to make counselling more accessible to those who can’t afford to pay for the privilege of mental health.

On the other, this is plan introduced jointly by the department for work and pensions for chrissakes. This is not about mental health, it is about the economy. Will this affect the type of treatment people will receive? The focus seems to be on cognitive behavioural therapy more than anything else (exclusively?), which, as the article neatly puts it, is “a method by which people are encouraged to look more at potential solutions than the causes of their difficulties”.

Well obviously, as one of the causes in this instance would surely be capitalism and the fuck-ups of the government?

I read this article this morning, felt ambivalent, then forgot about it. Just now, reading bfp’s latest ‘rethinking walking’ post, where she connects questions of disability and the right to mobility to oppressive capitalist structures which restrict movement: prisons, border, reservations, walls, I was reminded of it again. One of the many questions she asks is:

What would a medical praxis that operates in a capitalist structure look like that centered working the roots out rather than chopping down the tree?

I would love to know. I don’t think it’s this.

What would a society look like that gave a damn about mental health when there’s not an economic incentive?

And a more immediate question: will this counselling be available to those with long-term mental health problem who were already not employed? Those already relegated to the ‘untreatable’ pile and never offered anything but medication, sections and/or prison?

Zimbabwe: Jestina Mukoko and others out on bail

Finally! Although still on bail of course…

Via Nehanda Radio Blog:

The Truth and Justice Coalition (TJC) today welcomed the release on bail of Jestina Mukoko, other human rights defenders and opposition activists yesterday in Zimbabwe. The organisation noted that the release on bail of Jestina and others would enable them to access badly needed medical treatment, and would also bring some relief to their families.

Ms Mukoko and others were abducted from their homes and offices several months ago by state security agents who brutally tortured them for the duration of their detention. They were subsequently charged with crimes ranging from treason, banditry and terrorism. Several court orders including those holding that the abductees should be treated in hospital had previously been ignored.