One persons hatred is another’s rationality. I get the Mail ocassionally and find that it is very finely tunes to its readership in a way that the Guardian isn’t.

I recall an article on CiF by the editor of the black newspaper New Nation calling for all black short lists for Parliament. The response was, apart from Simon Wooley who gad proposed the scam, entirely hostile and I am talking about a hundred and fifty posts.

What I have found on the left is that anything in the Mail/Express or Telegraph is dismissed simply because it appeared in thos papers and therefore cannot be true. No one seems to be saying, yes well they called that one correctly.

The BNP’s website can certainly be described as poisonous but even there they will always have a kernel of truth in what they say. The Mail is far closer to what the majority of people in this country think than the Guardian I can assure you.

Halima, saw the article about you in East End Life and Clare will be e mailing you soon.

If the five were ever likely to be able to afford to sue and make a good job of it that front page would never have appeared for my money.

The Mail is a hate filled rag – that it went off on one at the Lawrence accused doesn’t change that.

George, what are on about mate? I think you are a box ticker, what do you mean that my comments about the Race Indistry could have come out of the Daily Mail. I suppose it must be that your 1970s Marxist thinking on railway lines leads you to the belief that anything that the Daily Mail says must be wrong. I can just imagine you, a pointy headed Hamstead intellectual with a sneering condescending attitude to the lower orders that you want lead to the revolution but don’t really want to live next door to. Just remember when you slag of the Mail

Let’s look at a couple of things starting with the R and C article you quote from. What the fuck was it all about apart from stating the bloody obvious? It seems it was ” original and explanatory” and aids our understanding” understanding of what, how to buy shoes for the kids or pay the gas bill?

Then go and look at the latest Jenny Bourne cotribution to the collective wisdom of the human race. She asks a lot of questions but doesn’t come up with any answers and this is typical of a number of publications like R and C.

As to my typos George what is the point of mentioning them if not to show that you are cleverer than me? Oh and by the way Ian spells his name Hislop!

George stay in your little time warp of a black liberation/Marxism ghetto. The world has moved on from thise days. The Darcus Howes and Tarique Alis have been show up for the intellectual frauds they always were, chuck Sivanandan in there as well with Robin Blackburn and a few others from things like New Left Review.

Trust me George, I’m a bricklayer!

Judging by what follows there mate, that’s about the equivalent of Jordan asking someone to put their chest away.

From my one post, you hasten to conclude I am “race industry linked”. What is the race industry? Isn’t it a term used by the likes of the Daily Mail? I am not connected with any organised activity, but I do subscribe to periodicals like R & C, among others. And why is my tone hysterical and not yours?
You say Siva is no community activist but you are. An activist is one who actively works, usually in organised groups, for the benefit of an oppressed community or minority. Siva used to be in the streets in the 1960s but as he aged, he preferred to devote his talents to analysis and commentary to counter the ceaseless spin and propaganda emanating from the mainstream (politicians and media). What is your concept of activism?
Independent analysts are pretty rare among Asians. Agree? Take an example:
The political climate today (from Race & Class, vol48, April 2007)
”The myriad problems thrown up by immigration and asylum policies – incarceration, detention, deportaton, deprivation and death – all derive from the laws and strictures of the government. The nation state today serves the global economy run by multinational corporations. We have moved from the welfare state of late industrial capitalism to the market state of global capitalism. The global corporations have marauded into Third World countries in search of new markets, cheap labour, natural resources. Such incursions need friendly regimes in these countries. If that doesn’t work, they can try regime change – through assassinations and economic sanctions by the West. Or failing that, through bombing the hell out of the offending regime. “
Such an original and explanatory analysis aids understanding but apparently you are not impressed. Most South Asians seem not at ease with intellectual constructions. I am reminded about what VS Naipaul wrote in 1962 when he visited India: “The poverty of the Indian land also extends to the Indian mind. The intellectual failure disappoints and in the end fatigues. India lies all on the surface.” (This may not apply to Bangladesh.)
You then enter into the absurd by drawing a comparison with “Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or any other of a number of homicidal maniacs of the last century.” What cynicism or is it hysteria?
And you quote the periodical of an establishment figure like Ian Hyslop. Your intellectualism shows badly when you say “struggles by real people are hijacked by so called intellectuals And there are the misspelled words – ‘’resistence, ‘sieze’, ‘endevours’. I hope they are just typos.”. I am sorry you got exhausted after penning your reply

When I hear people like Sivanandan described as ” community activists” I don’t know whether to laugh to cry. In the thirty four years that I have been active with the Bangladeshi community in the East End over many issues and in my current activities against the BNP in Hackney Tower Hamlets and outer East London I have never set eyes on the man or been aware of any activities he has been invovled in.

I have on my bookshelf a Race and Class publication called ” A World To Win. Essays In Honour Of A Sivanandan”. I bought it years ago and keep meaning to take it around tothe Salvation Army, good job I didn’t as I can now treat you to some of the most sycophantic Marxist psycho babble I have ever come across, and believe me there really is some crap out there.

Apart from Chris Searle and Rev Ken Leech, both of who I know, I would describe all of those white people named about as falling into the guilt tripped white (GTW) category to one degree or another and the first two name could certainly be described as fellow travelers.

The introduction reads as follows. ” On the occasion of Sivanandan’s 75th birthday, the editorial working committee of Race and Class has taken the oppportunity to devote this issue of the journal to exploring and celebrating his unique contribution, not only to black struggle in Britain but to the anti-imperialist movement; not only to Marxist thought but to socialist practise; not only to philosophy but to literature”

This guy has been about a bit I hear you all say. If the gushing style sounds familiar it is because it could have been taken from any eulogy to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or any other of a number of homicidal manaics of the last century.

Of course I,m not suggesting in any way that the gentleman being so revered, had he ever been in a psotion of state power, would have gone around abolishing democracy and shooting anyone who disagreed with him ,it’s just that he ticks all the right boxes.

The gushing continues but I will finish with it shortly. ” Race and Class, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations, is, we believe, unique. That uniqueness derives from the principles hammered out with the support of some of the most distinguished scholar activists from the liberation movements of the 60s and 70s- Eqbal Ahmed, Ken Jordaan, Malcolm Caldwell, Basil Davidson, Chris Farley, Thomas Hodgkin, Orlando Letelier- in the aftermath of the transformation of the Institute itself from serving the policy-makers to serving the policed. Race, as it was then, was siezed from a dead academia and put to use; a dull, blunt instrument, it was honed, under Sivanandan’s leadership, to a sharp and glittering scalpel to cut through the lies of power- in the belief that the function of knowledge is to liberate”

As Private Eye would say ” Pass the sick bag Alice” and I think this one is a definite entry into pseud’s corner.

The problem with the Sivanandans of the world is that they actually believe their own rhetoric. Living as they do in a tightly knit “academic” community divorced from what is really happening they have had their mind set shaped by two of the most pernicious ideologies ever to be inflicted on the human race. So called “black liberation” and Marxism.

The IRR isn’t the only culprit here, any number of “think tanks” and quasi official government organisations have spent the last forty years making up theories to explain things that were taking place over which they had no control and no influence on.

One of the most viscious rip offs of reality was the invention of ” Communities of Resistence”. I was a part of one of those, the Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets which, in the 1970s launched an autonomous struggle firstly over the racist housing policies of the local authorities and the Greater London Council and then in organising self defence squads against the National Front and NF influenced racists.

Between 1974 and the early eighties the community launched a massive squatting campaign which siezed and held hundreds of council owned properties and forced both councils to back down over their plans to disperse Bangladeshis to outlying parts of London where there was empty property but where Bangladeshis didn’t want to live.

During those years we were it seems one of the communities of resistence that the IRR had brought into being, the only problem was that we didn’t actually know that we were carrying out the plans of a group of people we had never heard of.

What of course was happening and is still happening is that real events on the ground and struggles by real people are hijacked by so called intellectuals into a master explaantion of the universe that they were clever enough to see.

I’ll let everyone chew over that for a while as I am so exausted by my literary endevours that I feel the need for a few pints of Stella, after all I’m only a bricklayer?

Isn’t it interesting how the people accused of “ranting” always turn out to be people with whom the writer disagrees. I’m not quite sure of the exact linguistic criteria for a rant, but looking at that link to the Bourne woman, one has to think pots and kettles.

The word “populist”, one of the most blatant and cheapest of weasel words in the language, is always a giveaway to where the writer is coming from and what axe they have to grind. Does it mean anything, apart from being a pure booh word, just as “progressive” is a pure hurrah word?

It needs to be here:

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/dictionary.php

It’s like this, Phil Woolas and all other MP’s, particularly urban ones, will be getting postbags where of the letters pertaining to immigration, 80% plus will be along the lines of “something drastic has got to be done about immigration”. Now in my understanding of democracy, it would be democratic of said MP to decide that they must pay some attention to the wishes of their constituents.
But to those on the left, this would be “pandering to populism”. So what would be the democratic approach in their book – to tear each letter up and chuck it in the bin, because it is “racist”?
And I note that on an earlier thread:

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/2468

ala quotes that 46 per cent of the public favour building eco-towns and around 80% are in favour of wind farms. So, if the government listened to that 46% and 80% and took steps in accordance with their wishes, would that be “pandering to populism” or democracy in action?

If anything the reaction on there rather saddens me, not least because some people seem to see it as nothing more than a chance to wave the collective penis simply because it’s Hazel Blears. Even if that means backing the BNP.

Siva is dismissed as a ‘honcho’. Meaning what?
Siva is long time director of IRR and co-editor of Race & Class. Has B bothered to read any article from this independent quarterly? Over half its editorial board are white – John Berger, Victoria Brittain, Jeremy Corbyn, Saul Landau, Nancy Murray, Bill Rolston , Chris Searle. Are these all half-wits?

Siva has long been a courageous community activist and highly original thinker, not afraid to take on the establidshment – a quality arguably rare in South Asians in Britain.
He ‘tells it like it is’, thereby sullying the neat political and social picture in Britain spun in place by media pundits and state officials. He starts from the premise: “This above all we have in common – a visceral hatred of all forms of injustice.”
This is a sort of statement that should come from the Church leaders. But the church prefers to be in good books with the state.
Here are some extracts from a Siva’s commentary:

Racism and the press (published as IRR Pamphlet No 12, 1989)
There is not one national daily in this country which is not right of centre – excpet for the Morning Star. Just think how that limits our horizons. We are not presented with the truth of an issue. Instead we are told what to think, Facts themselves are, in the more degenerate papers, distorted or concocted…
Newspapers are not so much in the busness of presenting news any more as making opinion or opinion dressed up as news. Views vary from the virulent racism of the Sun and the Mail through the respectable racism of the Times and Telegraph to the paternalism of the Guardian. The Sun caters to the basest appetites and meanest prejudices in each of us and passes themm off as virtues. Under the guise of national pride or patriotism, it teahces us to hate everything foreign or different. The press barons (like Rupert Murdoch or the Rothemeres) set the ideological agenda and influence political power.

The long time head honcho was A Sivanandan whose word on anything to do with race was holy writ. Once he had pronounced you a racist that was it, you were finished.

What is interesting here is that like CiF those posting don’t seem to always agree with the sentiments of the moderators. There was an article on CiF a week or so ago by the editor on New Nation Lester Holloway demanding all black short lists as a way of rectifying the supposed “democratic deficit” that is supposed to exist in British society because elected bodies don’t exactly mirror the ethnic make up of the country.

The whole thing is basically a financial con trick by Operation Black Vote. There were a couple of hundred posts all of them slagging the whole thing off, eventually Simon Wooley got in to try and defend the scam and he was slagged off as well.

There is an interesting power struggle going on at the moment between Harriet Harman who supports the Wooleyites and Hazel Blears who has written an article in the Guardian today which sets out what the government is really thinking.

The front page is also an indication of which way the wind is blowing. At last the powers that be have woken up to what a few of us have been saying for years. You keep telling white people that they are racist, that they have all benefited from slavery and colonialism and need to apologise and make financial reparations then eventually they are going to turn around and say “fuck you, we’re voting for the BNP.

I was out in a pub in Essex doing anti BNP stuff just before the GLA elections when Ken Livingstone cam on the Channel 4 news shedding crocodile tears and apologising on behalf of all Londoners for slavery.

The pub went berserk. The govenor had to turn off the telly in case it was smashed. I said to myself ” Ken you have just lost”.

The problem with the IRR is that,like so many other similar organisation, it is totally divorced from reality. Staffed by people who genuinely hate whites and self hating guilt tripped whites they spend their entire lives looking for racism and if it doesn’t exist inventing it.

It will be an interesting time between now and the next election.

The lawyers that conduct public funded immigration & asylum cases are not the fat cats (ok an equity partner may make a good living but even then not on par with a junior commercial lawyer). Most chose this area as they do want to provide access to justice, despite the long hours & being paid less than a plumber. Legal aid firms have increasingly gone out of business due to the LSC cutting fee rates & with the tendering out of LSC contracts in the next year more will follow. Increasingy it is the more humane lawyers who are in practice.

@ 5 “figure of 12,000 pounds was quoted as being spent per HIV sufferers by the NHS in the case of N”

Before that there is the cost of each case & then the cost of appeals. Some cases can cost £10k plus the cost of any that go on to appeal. And bearing in mind that nearly circa 60% of appeals fail….

Humanity should be demonstrated but I am not convinced that all those asylum seekers who can drum up the resources to pay for the long passage to the UK are bona fide especially when there are other countries closer to them – when in dire straits would you not go to the nearest country?

What this means is that if you are Zimbabwean and seek asylum then you will get it, unless and until this caselaw is successfully challenged. It has a blanket effect.

The result will be that thousands of Zimbabweans whose appeals were thrown out by the AIT over the years will put in fresh or further representations. Thousands of Zimbabweans here on visit and student visas will now seek asylum and thousands of Zimbabwean HIV sufferers will make a beeline for the UK because there will now be a blanket policy. If I remember correctly a figure of 12,000 pounds was quoted as being spent per HIV sufferers by the NHS in the case of N (HIV sufferers under Article 3 ECHR). So rather than apply under the impossible test in N which basically says UK govt does not have responsibility to treat foreigners, these people will circumvent by seeking asylum to get the necessary treatment.

‘As soon as you, a politician, begin to air views about numbers being a problem (whatever your innocent intention may be) you change the racial discourse and you stoke up populist fears. The articulation itself does become part of the racial problem. As soon as you discuss numbers, devoid of any context, you fuel the popular fear that the person next door, the man in the dole queue, the Big Issue seller, are all illegals, non-belongers, takers of your White birthright. Politicians are not talking in a vacuum but in terms of a long debate which began before Powell and has been orchestrated on and off for over a century by the tabloids.’

Translated into English, I think that means that any politician of any stripe talking about this issue is intrinsically racist – presumably regardless of the skin colour of the various asylum seekers. The link is talking the language of a priori moral condemnation – a cheap shot by just about any standard.

I can’t think of a paragraph that has ever made me angrier. ‘White birthright,’ goodness – is this a cut and paste from KKK applied in a heavy handed way to the white British public?

Of course politicians are talking in terms of a wider social debate – what else informs politics and, by extension, government? Lawyer pressure groups are more than free to contribute to said debate. Quite how making an assumption that anyone the lawyers don’t like are incapable of individual analysis, still less decision-making free of hate and prejudice, contributes to that debate beats me.

No – the minister does not deride those, ‘who try to help asylum seekers.’ He very rightly derides the frivolous and feckless piss-takers, the actions of whom have sadly made necessary the ludicrous over-tightening of both asylum and immigration systems.

These lawyers, of course, could take up their argument with the public and press they so loathe, but no, it is easier to shout at the elected and ask him to blithely ignore political pressure that is very real. Pressure the lawyers will never have to face down.

I am more than capable of forming my own views that are not inherently racist. I certainly don’t need the lecture that the article provides.

There are real political issues of legitimacy and consent involved that can’t be taped over with boilerplate bullshit. Balancing the power of the executive is not the same as seizing executive and decision-making power.

If they feel they are in the right, they can stand for election, organise a military coup, run a terrorist campaign, whatever. But they don’t just get to unilaterally declare the feeding of massive amounts of public money into the maw of their vested interests as self-evidently the only possible way of dealing with the issue.

See someone starving in Zimbabwe, tortured in Syria, persecuted in Thailand, the first thought that comes to mind to help doesn’t tend to be ‘I know, I’ll buy another Mercedes for a London-based lawyer’

So just maybe it’s ok to look at other alternatives?

The HO listens to the likes of Daily Mail or Andrew Green, head of Migration Watch or think-tanks like Policy Exchange or Civitas