What is it about female hair ?

A French parliamentary commission has recommend a state ban of the Islamic burqua or full veil. It's a debate that will continue to rumble through the governments of western europe.

At a  pragmatic level even the better-informed Islamophobes see that state bans will produce the  opposite to the intended effect and strengthen funda-mentalism in minority communities.

Western liberals on the other hand are in danger of disappearing up their own relativist backsides in refusing  to address disturbing issues that they would never accept in their own culture.

Here's a thought though;  each of the images  here tells a story - and  these stories are not equally valid, they are equally fucked up. I could speculate at length on the cultural, historical and socio-economic origins of the customs portrayed, and the world-views they imply.

I think it is sufficient to simply say that they each reveal some profoundly twisted shit: About property relations, about the status of women, about suppressed sexuality ... and most of all about the unique and extraordinary power of religion to get people to connive in their own subordination.

BNP - Fascists outed

The propensity of the Far Right to self-destruct is a source of continual amusement and comfort. The news that a hardline member of the BNP, disgruntled at the party’s supposedly moderate / populist turn towards a UKIP audience, has published the entire membership on line is, frankly, fucking hilarious.

As is Nick Griffin’s response that the member will come to regret this as ‘the worst decision of his life’. On the other hand he has bleated on about the infringement of his members’ civil liberties. His response goes to the heart of two old chestnuts about the BNP.

Firstly their respectable façade – Griffin may now be on Radio 4 laughably citing the Human Rights Act, which he so strongly opposed, but his initial reaction was nothing more than a thinly veiled threat of violence to sort out the trouble maker in his midst.

And secondly the question - should the BNP have the same rights as any other political party ?

- This shouldn’t need explaining again, but for the hard of thinking the Fascists (for that is what the BNP really are) are NOT just any other party. They are not simply a misguided bunch of loons. They actively promote racial hatred wherever they go. Their ranks include streetfighters who engage in physical attacks – both racially motivated and against political opponents. Much of this activity is illegal – but even if it wasn’t, it would be grounds not to tolerate their intolerance.

Far from amusing though is how the membership list reveals their penetration of mainstream society; in particular the police, the prison service, the army, teaching and other ‘public’ services.

For those agonising over the justification of the ‘outing’ of the Fascists, here it is: Membership of a racist organisation is simply incompatible with the role of someone who is in a position of care or public trust because they cannot serve the community even-handedly.

I'm not going to post the link here - but you maybe able to follow a trail from here - if steps haven't been taken yet to cover over the traces. If you see anyone you know feel free to get in touch with them to discuss their odious little secret. And if any of the named are working in the public sector – let’s get the fuckers sacked.

'Bloody do-gooders'

I was having a discussion with a few colleagues at work about identity cards and asylum seekers, and I got called a ‘do-gooder’.

It’s a strange form of abuse when you think about it . Do-gooder as opposed to what ? A ‘do-bollocks to them all-er’ or a ‘do-don’t give a shit about anyone else-er’ or a ‘do -not in my backyard-er’ ?

Of course I knew what they meant. When I was a bit more doctrinaire I would use ‘liberal’ in the same way – as in petty-bourgeois liberal who fails to understand the correct Marxist perspective.

But after years of dealing with real reactionaries, I’ve woken up to the fact that there are worse things than being a liberal. Things like being a xenophobic racist cunt.

This is how it starts ...

I am deeply suspicious of the Cambridgeshire Chief Constable’s remarks about the strain that immigration is placing on policing resources.

I’m pretty sure that if a senior public servant like Julie Spence simply wanted more funding then private lobbying would be a more usual and effective tactic than calling a press conference. I see a deliberate attempt to manufacture and manipulate an anti-immigration consensus.

It’s no accident that only last week Gordon Brown launched a back to work initiative ‘British Jobs For British Workers’, and that this week the government want to rubbish the idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants put forward at the the Lib-Dem’s conference. Or that it won't give up on the identity card campaign

These are worrying times because I can see this consensus building and there seem to be two kinds of people who are on this ant-immigration bandwagon.

Firstly, the Little Englanders who get upset about our culture being eroded. These people live comfortable middle-class lives that are in no way threatened by the social problems posed by immigrants – they don’t compete for the same low paid jobs or the same cheap housing. With the perspective of a couple of generations these people will appear as ugly and stupid as their forebears who railed against Jewish and Irish immigration.

Secondly, the genuinely aggrieved ‘indigenous’ population who are at the bottom of the pile and are competing for low paid jobs and cheap housing. They have been abandoned by New Labour and find themselves in a classic poverty trap. As a result they are being driven into the ranks of the racists and the Xenophobes.

To stop this drift we need to point the finger not at low paid migrants but at the likes of Tescos and others in the food industry who are making obscene profits on the back of cheap casual labour in rural areas.

If we don't, to quote Basil Fawlty: ‘this is exactly how Nazi Germany started’…

(Bloody hell now we’ve even got the small time savers rushing to get their money before the bank crashes !)

I

Saying Sorry For Slavery

To mark the bicentenary of its abolition, Tony Blair has said that Britain’s slave trade was ‘regrettable’. Not quite the apology or reparation that has stirred so much controversy.

Everyone’s apologising for past sins these days, even the Pope (for the repression of women for centuries). But I’m not sure that I buy into the idea of collective and/or inherited guilt. And I don’t know how you compensate for crimes against peoples that span generations.

There may even be a kind of racism in thinking this way. Having seen the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum last year I found it difficult to look modern Germans in the eye. But in truth the only thing that links liberal young Germans today with the SS generation is their German-ness. Do they bear some sort of genetic stain of Nazism ?

The story of slavery is a horror that should be known and commemorated. How many tourist that visit the Jane Austen theme park that is Bath, with its Georgian crescents and assembly rooms, know the sinister reason for its splendour ? The eighteenth century town was built as a demonstration of the wealth that the slave trade brought to the West Country, and the respectability of the slave traders. We should know that modern Britain was largely built on slavery. Britain was the first industrial nation, and its economic take-off was made possible by wealth accumulated from the slave trade.

But in apportioning blame, who was more culpable the agricultural labourer in Britain, or the West African slave trader who captured the slaves and sold them to the Europeans ? By the logic of inherited collective guilt, their descendants in Nigeria and Ghana should apologise to African-Americans.

We should also remember that slavery disappeared because of a fight not the inevitable march of progress. Although the abolitionists may be revered today, at the time slavers argued fiercely that slavery was actually benevolent and an economic necessity. Much like those who now argue that sweat shops and free trade zones in developing countries are in the interests of those who are exploited. Rather than apologising for the past it would be more meaningful if we looked at slavery today; glamorous designer brands that use child labour in developing countries, human traffic in the sex industry or the exploitation of migrant labour.