Race, the police and two stories of Paris
Gary Younge has given a brilliant interview about the story of the Roma girl in Greece, and the girl in Ireland whose parents were wrongly suspected of not being her parents: http://rabble.ie/2013/10/23/roma-racism-and-tabloid-policing-interview-with-gary-younge/y
Reading it has reminded me of something about Gary Younge, and it’s a lesson in how very protected white people are, and therefore how ignorant.
Younge lived in Paris in 1990, and he writes about it in his book Who Are We? He at first had difficulty finding a flat because he was black. Then someone helped him find a flat-share. But it was in a posh area, near the Panthéon:
“Few black people could afford to live there so whenever I went out I ran the risk of being stopped, searched and rifled for my papers. The assumption was that I was either an illegal immigrant, a thief or a burglar. Almost every day I would suffer this indignity at the hands of the state, and some days more than once.”
One day he was pulled off a métro train at Arts et Métiers station
“and beaten up by several policemen who claimed they were looking for drugs. After that, whenever I saw police, my stomach would tighten and my legs weaken.”
He was in Paris on a student exchange for 6 months in 1990. I was there in 1990 too, and I lived there till 1995. In all that time, nothing like that ever happened to me. How cosseted I was.
I didn’t live near the Panthéon, as it happens. I lived in the 18th arrondissement, near La Porte de Clignancourt. It’s a good mixed area, including white French, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, and a goodly Arab population (most of them originally from Algeria). As a result there were some interesting shops to be found!
Some time in, I think, 1993, a local resident from Ghana was arrested and taken into the local nick and when he came out he was dead from shotgun wounds. He didn’t have a shotgun when he was arrested. Demonstrations after his death continued for a week, heavily controlled by armed police. It was also heavily misreported. One newspaper described how demonstrators had shattered the glass in bus shelters and telephone kiosks. I walked round, but couldn’t find any.
All that was 20 years ago. Aren’t things very different now? Haven’t attitudes changed? We don’t make racist assumptions any more, do we? I’m not so sure. I noticed in recent years that Eurostar travellers wanting to book hotel rooms near the Porte de Clignancourt were actually being warned that some customers had said this area of Montmartre, where I lived unmolested for 5 years, was not safe.
What fantasies haunt the minds of at least some here-today-and-gone-tomorrow Eurostar customers?
Down the privatised drain
An article in the New York Times today (see below) is both funny and informative. It is about government plans to upgrade London’s sewage system, privately of course. There are concerns here about the environment, and about disruption during construction. But much of the discussion is about who is the most appropriate provider, the public or the private sector. The government, of course, says private.
A few points to make: Ann Rosenberg is surely right here when she says:
“The thing that sticks in my throat is that I will be paying for this until I die, and then my children will pay for this tunnel, which none of us will own but which will go into the asset base of Thames Water and its investors.”
And Michael Gerrard at Thames Water revives a hoary old bit of nonsense: “Londoners”, he says testily to objectors, many of whom, like Ann Rosenberg, catch a hint of the profit motive wafting on the breeze, “will have to contribute to their city’s future. If you want London to grow you must invest in the infrastructure.” Sorry, Michael, Londoners would be “contributing to their city’s future” even if your company was bypassed in favour of public investment. Sewage treatment wouldn’t be free. Londoners would contribute as taxpayers.
Of course, Michael Gerrard is not thinking of contributing. He’s thinking of profiting. And we should never forget that if the service is to be provided by the private sector it has to be profitable. So if profit margins aren’t satisfactory, prices will presumably rise (whatever makes me think that?).
But if the company goes bust? Well, the government that let the company loose on our sewage will try to persuade another company to take over the operation (British Gas, for example, or Tescos). If that doesn’t work, it will step in to pick up the pieces, pay for all the costs of failure, and set about providing the service itself from the public purse. All that will cost Londoners a great deal of money. So couldn’t we move straight to public, and cut out the nonsense in between? After all, it’s quite an essential service.
Anyway, here’s the article:
REVISITING UKIP
I’ve had a bit of feedback to my blog on UKIP. So I have revisited the questions I raised, i.e. whether UKIP is a fascist party, and the question of legal status.
It’s often too easy, if we’re lazy, to label the political right as fascist. It was often said that the Thatcher government was fascist but, in one meeting I attended back then, someone rightly pointed out that if that were true we wouldn’t be holding the meeting! So maybe I’ve fallen into the lazy trap. But as I say that, I am still uneasy.
What can’t be denied is that UKIP is a party of the hard right which campaigns not just against the EU but also against LGBT equality, for harsher immigration controls, deeper spending cuts and a quicker break-up of the NHS. In the European Parliament it is in a grouping which includes the far-right, anti-gay United Poland party and the right-wing Northern League of Italy.
The aim of fascism is to smash all working class organisation and ultimately all forms of democracy. Its aim is to use parliamentary democracy in order to destroy it. And fascism means violence, and fascists today encourage and engage in violent street attacks on blacks and Asians (especially Muslims), asylum seekers, LGBT people, trade unionists, the left and so on. This description doesn’t fit UKIP as a party, and its party organisation doesn’t have the disciplined combat form characteristic of fascist parties.
And yet … The history of some of its core members is fascist: HOPE not Hate has highlighted the case of Robert Ray, an Essex councillor, once National Front (NF) organiser for Newham, who canvassed with Nigel Farage during the recent Thurrock council by-election; Nigel Farage himself seems to have such a history, with teachers at his school worried about him being appointed a prefect. One alleged that he was among pupils who marched late at night through a Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs.
The words and actions of other prominent UKIP members give rise to similar worries about the core beliefs and attitudes of UKIP. Much of this is documented by HOPE not Hate. Alexandra Phillips, UKIP’s Head of Media, has a particularly bad record when using – well, yes – the media. On Facebook, she frequently mocks the disabled, often referring to herself or others as “spaz” or “spasticated”, both words, says HOPE not Hate, “that have thankfully dropped out of common usage as the majority of British society regard them as offensive.” She also refers to an online friend as an “autistic wanker”. She says she is “hungrier than a Biafran”, a mocking reference to those who starved during the 1960s Nigerian-Biafran war. She said she was “bored of being Anne Frank”, referring to the iconic Dutch victim of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Farage, like Enoch Powell before him, likes to raise impossible spectres so that voters, fearful of the future, will turn to him. Powell’s spectre was of a kind of bloodbath that would take place as a result of immigration: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Compared to that, Farage’s effort at this year’s conference, like much of what he does, is laughable. And yet it isn’t. For the aim is the same. So he says that from 1 January next year,
nearly 30 million of the good people of Bulgaria and Romania have open access to our country, our welfare system our jobs market. How many will take advantage of that no one knows. The Home Office don’t have any idea at all. The previous estimate was 13,000 in total. Migration Watch thinks 50,000 a year. It could be many times that.
Then he gets to crime, and the threat becomes more sinister, more dangerous:
There is an even darker side to the opening of the door in January. London is already experiencing a Romanian crime wave. There have been an astounding 27,500 arrests in the Metropolitan Police area in the last five years. 92 per cent of ATM crime is committed by Romanians. This gets to the heart of the immigration policy that UKIP wants, we should not welcome foreign criminal gangs and we must deport those who have committed offences.
The statistics here are used in an extremely doubtful way, and HOPE not Hate explains this better than I can – go to the following link and scroll down a bit:
FactCheck: Nigel Farage’s Ukip conference speech
All this is worrying. Of course, some of the scandals associated with UKIP are about the usual jealousies and infighting that go on in any political party. But we should take their racism and xenophobia seriously. When Powell talked of blood, ethnic minorities were attacked and people died. There are similar consequences when Farage does his anti-Romanian rant. HOPE not Hate tells how, in the Eastleigh by-election, the UKIP candidate linked Romanians with “a natural propensity to crime”. Shortly after, two young Romanian workers were attacked in Brighton because their language sounded “East European”. It is partly the rhetoric used, and the images conjured up, by Farage and UKIP as well as the fascists of the BNP and the EDL, that has led to the spate of recent racist attacks on my Afghan-British neighbours as they drive their taxis in the small hours.
And I suppose the question is: Do we want UKIP to get its hands on the levers of power? Because I suspect that, if they do, hostilities will cease between UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. And then we’ll find out whether UKIP is fascist or not.
I think that fascist parties should be banned. And UKIP?
Workers’ rights in Qatar (see previous blog)
Back to Qatar. And football. But not – except in passing – back to workers’ rights. Channel 4 News tonight reported that the 2022 World Cup will go ahead and the place will be Qatar. But there were still concerns.
What were they? Well, the summer heat, really. So could the event be moved to winter? No. To have it at Christmas would clash with the Champions League “at its most lucrative stage”. So that’s Christmas ruled out. So it’s got to be after Christmas, then? No. That would clash with the Winter Olympics or Superbowl – presumably for the same lucrative reasons. Some say that to leave it in the summer period will put the health and safety of players at risk. Others say the newly built eco-friendly stadiums will solve the problems of the desert heat.
So stalemate.
But the last two points (health and safety of players and eco-friendly stadiums) ought to remind us of something else. For while the health and safety of players is important, what about the health and safety of the workers who are building the eco-friendly stadiums and other bits of superstructure at such risk to life and limb (see previous blog)? Unless that issue is addressed, the accidents will continue, the death toll will rise. Qatar 2022’s Hassan al-Thawadi tried to reassure us tonight with talk of “initiatives” by the government and his organisation, but his gabbled and garbled message failed to convince. Meanwhile, FIFA’s Sepp Blatter proclaimed that there were 9 years in which to resolve the issues. He also said that he couldn’t predict the outcome of the arguments about winter, summer, before Christmas, after Christmas, or even, I think, about desert heat, because he was not a prophet. One thing seems likely though: there will be many families in Nepal and India who, after seeing their relatives off to construction jobs in Qatar, will be fearful of predicting whether they will ever return.
Qatar, football and a bit of French history
The country preparing to host the 2022 World Cup is in the news again. Qatar’s treatment of foreign construction workers, hired to build the infrastructure for the event, has shocked FIFA, the UEFA president, the International Labour Organisation, the International TUC and even the British government (The Guardian, 3/10/2013). The Nepalese government claims that 70 Nepalese died in Qatar since the beginning of 2012, and The Guardian reports: “Hundreds more are thought to have been injured in falls and accidents with machinery and vehicles.” The paper’s investigation suggests a worse situation: it found that “44 Nepalese workers had died in Qatar between 4 June and 8 August this year”. Undeterred, the Qatar government is ploughing on towards more exploitation: as unions predict 4,000 deaths “before a ball is kicked”, Qatar “is expected to bring in at least 500,000 more workers on top of the 1.2 million, including 340,000 from Nepal and more from India.”
One of the names appearing among all this is that of former French footballer Zinedine Zidane. He was once an icon among the “beurs” of the poor French “suburbs” – the banlieues; “beurs” are, like him, descendants of Arab immigrant parents. The Qatar story is a reminder of how he lost his iconic status.
To begin at the beginning. In the summer of 1998 there were claims that France had entered a new phase in its history, when it would be able to see itself as a diverse society, “a France”, in the words of anti-racist campaigner Harlem Désir, “rich in all its children whatever their origin.” France’s multi-ethnic football team had won the World Cup (Zinedine scored two out of the three goals against Brazil) and it seemed that the country had experienced a catharsis. President Chirac and prime minister Jospin watched the match in the stadium and, on Bastille Day two days later, Chirac “hailed his country’s victorious team … as a beautiful image of France and of the strength of its multiracial society.” Discrimination, division and racism belonged to the past.
However, the catharsis turned out to be little more than an emotional spasm and France’s social harmony has proved very fragile indeed. Le Pen came second in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections and in 2005 rioting broke out in the banlieues. The riots began in Clichy-sous-Bois when two boys, aged 15 and 17, died climbing an electrified fence while fleeing the police. They spread throughout France, with petrol bombs being thrown and cars set on fire. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the protesters “scum”, but it became clear that Clichy was a catalyst for protesters with a range of grievances about discrimination, marginalisation, racism and inequality. “It’s unfortunate”, Nadir, from Aubervilliers, told the newspaper Le Monde, “but we have no choice.” According to sociologist Eric Macé, among the causes of the riots were “the highest unemployment rates in Europe, racist discrimination and growing urban marginalisation and, since the beginning of the 1990s, a stigmatisation of the youth of the working-class suburbs which makes them appear foreign to French society and constructs them as a menace …”
The fleeting hopes of 1998 seem foolish in this light. By 2006 Zinedine was no longer an icon to beurs. He came from the Marseilles bidonville (shanty town) of La Castellane but in 2006 one of the fans of the Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG) football team told Le Monde,
“His image is too pure. He is afraid to say what he is, that he is a beur … like the rest of us. And to tell the truth about what it is like to be an Arab in this society.”
The stands at PSG’s ground were the scenes of what Le Monde called a
“civil war … between two sets of supporters. These are the predominantly white “Boulogne Boys” of the Boulogne Stand (who are alleged to have far-right links) and the mixed-race and Arab fans … who gather on the Auteuil terraces.”
Football did not heal the social divisions of France.
Today Qatar is thought to have paid close to £2m pounds to get Zinedine as bid ambassador for the country and Zinedine has earned his keep. Ignoring the lessons of post-1998 France he declared his faith in football’s ability to build bridges and inspire hope. “When I think of all the youth of the Middle East”, he said, “what they’re missing is an event like the World Cup.”
No, Zinedine, wrong answer. They actually need a number of other things first. Just like the people of the banlieues in 2005 – and, come to that, today – they need an end to poverty, unemployment, marginalisation and discrimination. Together with the Nepalese and other workers, hired to build prestigious sports palaces in Qatar and make profits for the already-rich, they need trade union rights and protection from murderous employers. And after that, do they need the World Cup? Not really. They will no doubt need football, but the World Cup is run by the rich to profit the rich.
What they can do without is a celebrity who has forgotten his roots to tell them what they’re “missing”.
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