Where do the Tories get their ideas?

WORKING PEOPLE were marching outside.Part of demonstration against Tory Austerity and in defence of NHS. Greater Manchester Police said it was biggest demonstration they had ever had, and no arrests were made but it wasn't to be seen on BBC TV.
  Photo from Manchester Evening News. 

"FOR HARD WORKING PEOPLE" read the banner greeting delegates arriving at this year's Tory party conference, in Manchester, echoing something said repeatedly at the Labour Party conference in Brighton. Well, they're a little bit rattled, and not too proud to nick a phrase, or anything else.

True enough, I imagine avoiding tax can be hard work, and so can justifying bankers bonuses. If the 50,000 or more (according to police estimates!) people marching outside against austerity and to defend the NHS disagree and don't recognise the Tories as being for them, there were high metal barriers to shield them from view, and security to stop TV from filming the demonstration.

I don't know whether that really explains how so many people filling the streets of Manchester became invisible on the early evening news (though we got a little glimpse later). Not even HG Wells' imagination could run to that, but it's a free country, so we're told, and where would we be without the media?

What we got was David Cameron saying he is "not going to stand by as people's aspirations to get on the property ladder, and own their own home are trashed". Ninety per cent mortgages. It won't lead to a housing bubble, we're assured. Not that house prices are already out of reach of working people. Nor - apart from a woman from the Institute of Economic Affairs - was anyone so rude as to recall the part played by sub-prime mortgages turned "toxic assets" in bringing on the world financial crisis.

We were given clips of Margaret Thatcher for the faithful, championing the "right to buy", but I suppose  it would have been disrespectful of the dead to blame her for so many Brits being so in debt, remember the words "negative equity", or mention how a big proportion of council homes that were sold have ended up in the hands of private landlords. As for new homes being built, a large percentage are now being sold abroad, not for would-be immigrants, dread the thought, but as an investment. 

Of course when Cameron promises to help people to own their own homes, he does not say anything about the increasing numbers who have not got a home, or those whom the combination of bedroom tax, rising rents and benefit capping are driving from pillar to post.  

 For those already on the pavements, who include a large number of ex-services personnel about whom our politicians and papers care so much, we've seen Redbridge police snatching food and sleeping bags from them, and Westminster council is making it illegal to give them food. The government has criminalised squatting but maybe David Cameron will promise the right to purchase your own bit of pavement and cardboard box.     

  But of course the whole point of the claim to be for "hard working people", to promote marriage, and to support those with "aspirations", is that rather than be angry with the rich who are responsible for the mess we're in, we are supposed to find someone worse off and less respectable than us to take things out on. Which is why Cameron and his crew are expected to announce new measures extending workfare, forcing the unemployed and disabled not only to search for jobs that are not there, but to accept work at less than a living wage, or even unpaid, what amounts to slave labour. Those who are in a job are supposed to feel better that someone is making those lazy b.s work, even if we wake up to find that the employer is getting rid of us because he can not only hire someone cheaper off the dole, but get them free of charge because they have to work for benefit.

There have been setbacks for this drive, companies have dropped out because of resistance and bad publicity, but notwithstanding that old slogan I recall that "Conservative Freedom Works!", it is becoming Conservatives Will Make You Work for Free!", and the government's advisers and septic think tanks are saying Workfare is popular!   

Reading about the so-called Policy Exchange which tends this kind of advice, people ask what it is and where it comes from. Something made me do a search linking 'Policy Exchange' with 'LM' and 'Spiked'. Well you never know. And here is one of the little tales this brought to light. I'll call it

Boris and the Handmaid.


Munira Mirza is an Oldham lass who went to Oxford, and the University of Kent, where she studied under Frank Furedi, the onetime thinker of the Revolutionary Communist Party(RCP), and Living Marxism (LM). A lasting association with this particular strain of "leftism" does not appear to have hindered Munira's career. Quite the contrary.

Today she is the Advisor for Arts and Culture Policy of the Greater London Authority under Boris Johnson's Tory mayorality.

According to her former employer, centre right think tank Policy Exchange, “Munira - author of the Policy Exchange pamphlet Culture Vultures - is not a card-carrying Tory member, but is one of a new generation of thinkers behind David Cameron's makeover of the party that is attracting money and fresh ideas.”
http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Munira_Mirza

It was soon after Munira Mirza joined Boris Johnson's team that the Cuba Solidarity Campaign was told that its Cuba Fiesta stage event was no longer wanted as part of the Rise festival in London. This festival, a hangover from Ken Livingstone's time, when it used to be called Respect (before George Galloway's party took that name), had been used to promote enjoyment of cultural diversity and good relations between communities, but as Mirza told the Cuban campaign, "it is no longer appropriate to have overtly political organisations involved in the programme or in the community area". When it was learned that "United Against Racism" would be dropped from the festival's publicity, trade unions and others who had taken part previously decided to take their support elsewhere.

But Boris' handmaid had set out her ideas beforehand, in a paper arguing that promotion of multiculturalism and emphasis on diversity actually strengthened racial divisions. This was published in 2004 by the Institute of Ideas - an outfit headed by Claire Fox, a former leading member of the RCP and co-publisher of LM magazine. Criticisng the Race Relations Amendment Acts and its requirement on bodies to promote good relations and diversity policies, she also  argued against any special conditions for minorities, and any measures to outlaw religious incitement, treat racially motivated crime differently, or interfere with the "free speech" of such as the BNP.  The Institute of Ideas is particularly keen on free speech. Claire Fox has been a guest on the BBC's "Moral Maze" and "Question Time". 
In 2007, Munira Mirza was one of the authors of Living Apart Together, British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism in 2007, published by the Policy Exchange, of which she had become  an Associate Research Fellow and for whom she also worked as a fundraiser, having the title Development Director.  Unlike the Institute of Ideas, which shared the old RCP offices with Spiked, the Policy Exchange has always shared offices with conservative think tank CChange (active 2001-2007), of which Dougie Smith, her now husband, was the co-ordinator.  ,

As we've said, Mirza does not seem to have had much trouble combining her links to the "Left" and Right. (But then Claire Fox has said these two terms no longer mean anything). Her association with Spiked!, which enables former RCP types esconsed in the Tory media to keep up their 'radical' pretensions, will have brought her in contact with Brendan O'Neill. In 2006 they co-founded the Manifesto Club, an organisation "with the aim of challenging cultural trends that restrain and stifle people's aspirations and initiative" . Brendan O'Neill too has opposed efforts to counter racism, in sport and other fields,

The report Mirza co-authored for the Policy Exchange, ‘Living Apart together’ included references to work from Josie Appleton, Andrew Calcutt, Kenan Malik and Brendan O'Neill. The last two are both former members of the RCP,  O'Neill, who writes for the Daily Telegraph, has been a supporter of the government's "welfare reform", criticising those who drew attention to the deaths of disabled people who had been passed "fit for work" and lost benefits.

Munira Mirza's husband Dougie Smith, is a former vice Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, and ex-Cameron speechwriter. In this intertwining of libertarian spirits we are reminded of the coincidence remarked in west London, of former RCP general secretary Kate Davies at the Notting Hill Housing Trust, and her partner becoming housing director with Hammersmith and Fulham council, where former FCS figure Harry Phibbs is a prominent councillor.


http://randompottins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/notting-hill-but-not-much-trust.html

http://randompottins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/life-and-death-is-not-game.html 

Taking wrong side on Bangladesh

 

WOMEN DEMAND JUSTICE.  But SWP joined wrong demonstration!

 

THERE were cheers in the courtroom and outside today, as a Bangladesh war crimes tribunal convicted and sentenced a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party to death for war crimes committed during the 197 war for independence from Pakistan.

The right-wing party's assistant secretary general, Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, 59, was found guilty on charges of genocide and torture of unarmed civilians. He had previously been acquitted for two of the seven original charges. One of the charges that carried the death penalty was being a commander of a  massacre of 120 people.

Kamaruzzaman was a Jamaat e Islam student leader during the 1971 war when the Islamist party sided with Pakistan and fought as militia, killing patriots, leftists and non-Muslim minorities. He is the fourth man to be convicted for these war crimes.

Although some may see the current government's willingness to prosecute past crimes as a way of diverting people from present problems, as highlighted by the death of 700 workers in a factory collapse, others say it is justice that was long overdue. Among those in the court today welcoming the verdict and sentence were veterans from the 1971 freedom fight, while outside and in the country generally, particularly Dhaka the capital, younger people fighting for democracy and social progress see settling accounts with the war criminals as part of their broader struggle against reaction.

 There have been mass demonstrations both for an against the the war crimes trials, with Jamaat e Islami supporters claiming the trials were a politically-motivated attack on their party, and right-wing Islamists taking the opportunity to attack those they call "atheists" or just insufficiently conservative in their adherance to Islam. Jama'ata has bussed supporters from rural areas into the capital.Several people have been killed in bitter street clashes, or assassinated.

This sharp division is not confined to Bangladesh.

I don't usually trust stories in the Daily Express , which in recent years has specialised in horrified headlines about schools serving Halal meat or immigrants stealing our homes and jobs, and I am not suspending my skepticism for this one from May 4, forwarded by a friend :

 BRITAIN’S most senior policeman has ordered a security review for 10 Bangladeshi political activists after they were named in a hit list compiled by Islamic extremists.
Met Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe has personally intervened following a series of death threats and sinister break-ins at the Britons’ homes.
The intimidation even includes the targeting of fundraising efforts for the victims of the Bangladesh building disaster.
“We will eliminate your entire ancestry,” one fundraiser was told in an anonymous Facebook message.
Another threat from Facebook user Islam Power reads: “We will exterminate all the atheists like you who work against Islam. Final warning.”
The 10 bloggers, singers, writers and charity workers have been denounced as “atheists”, a condemnation some worry will be taken as a cue by jihadists for assassination.
The threats are linked to the volatile politics of Bangladesh where dozens of activists have been murdered in recent weeks.
Security experts fear the violence might be exported as bloodshed on Britain’s streets.
The 10 on the hit list are leaders of the UK arm of the Shahbag campaign calling for justice against those accused of war crimes during the 1971 independence struggle with Pakistan.
The alleged war criminals, whose atrocities included genocide, rape and murder of academics and journalists, were pro-Pakistan.
Many have since become leaders of the Islamist Jamaat e Islami party, which wants an Islamic republic of Bangladesh.
They accuse the current legal process against them in Bangladesh as being politically tainted.
More than 60 people have been killed since February during clashes between Shahbag and Jamaat activists in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.
One popular Shahbag blogger was murdered by a man wielding a machete for alleged insults against Islam.
Last Sunday, dozens of riot police were on duty in case of violence in Whitechapel, east London, where there have also been regular protests.
Scotland Yard is now studying a dossier of evidence detailing the recent threats against the UK activists.
The lone woman among the 10, Ajanta Deb Roy, a 27-year-old marketing manager, has been forced to move out of her home in east London following the threats.
Police have equipped her with a panic alarm and classified her as a top security priority.
Within days of raising money for families of the 500 people killed in the Dhaka garments factory collapse, she was even accused of exploiting the tragedy for political purposes.
She said: “It’s disgusting. I feel threatened because some of the Bengali community here are really conservative.
“They strictly follow religion and they don’t really follow the details of the news, they live in their own world.
“So if they see I’ve been called an atheist they just assume I’m abusing Islam and they wouldn’t try to verify that.
“They’ll just see my name on a list and come and attack me and think they’ll go to heaven. They’re brainwashed.
“I’m not an atheist, I’m just an activist.”


The Express story went on to quote threats made on Facebook, which immediately put me in mind of the Sun 'scoop' during the Gaza war about Islamists supposedly threatening prominent British Jews, which rested on messages posted on a Muslim web list. The postings turned out to come from the same computer used by the "expert on terrorism" whom the Sun was quoting. Sir Alan Sugar, whom the paper had depicted as a possible target successfully sued the Sun.

The comments made to the Express by readers whose outlook is plainly that of the lumpen EDL are a salutary reminder of the context in which such stories appear.
   
Nevertheless in this case Ted Jeory, described as the paper's Home Affairs editor, does show some knowledge of the political background, and does quote genuine people. His report goes on to report  London Assembly member Murad Qureshi:: “Jihadists will think it is their duty to annihilate those listed as atheist. “Much of this is a reflection of the politics of Bangladesh being played out in London, but nonetheless it poses a real threat to British subjects.”

Murad Qureshi, a Labour member of the London Assembly, is of Bangladeshi parentage, and he was in Bangladesh for the 2008 election. The other day he was at Westbourne Park with trades unionists protesting blacklisting outside the Crossrail site. If Murad says the threat is real that is good enough for me.

It is over a decade in fact that I heard from some Bangladeshi socialists their concern that the British government had connived at the entry to Britain of men who were wanted for war crimes in Bangladesh. They named at least three who had slipped into positions in the East London mosque. Their fear was that with most Bangladeshi immigrants in Tower Hamlets having come from Sylhet province before the 1971 war from which Bngladesh emerged, they might be unable to counteract the miseducation which these men could impart to the young.

Their suspicion, and mine, was that some people in the British state might see conservative, even reactionary, religious dominance as a welcome ally in combatting left-wing influences fed by the struggle for better social conditons and against racism.

Back in the 1930s it was the Left which succeeded in uniting East End Jewish and non-Jewish workers in the fight against slum landlords as well as Mosley's fascists. In 1945 the Mile End division of Stepney returned a Communist MP, Phil Piratin. Our enemies can learn from our history even if we don't.

Over the years, the Jama'at e Islami has extended its influence in Tower Hamlets politics as much as in Bangladesh. It has learned how to play the system, whether in getting councillors elected under whatever party label or raising funds. It has been assisted by the opportunism of British politicians like Galloway and Livingstone, among those who don't ask too many questions. And it seems they are not alone.  

Here is Socialist Worker reporting a march by Bangladeshis against the war crimes trials:


   "Around 1,000 people protested in central London last Sunday in solidarity with anti-government protesters in Bangladesh. The protest marched from Hyde Park to the Bangladeshi Embassy.
    Muhammad Ayyub is part of the Feb28 Justice for Bangladesh group that organised the protest. “We stand with the people of Bangladesh against the government,” he told Socialist Worker.
    “Police are killing protesters there and opposition supporters have been unlawfully arrested.”    The protest coincided with a deepening political crisis in Bangladesh.    “Ordinary people in Bangladesh don’t matter,” said Rashid. “Many live on less than a dollar a day. But when the rich people came here for the Olympics they booked a whole floor of a five-star hotel.”
    Protesters chanted, “We want peace. We want justice,” at a rally outside the embassy.  Speakers who talked about the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt won loud cheers. Charlie Kimber, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, told the crowd, “The tide of revolution has swept through Tunisia and Egypt.“Now the tide of revolution must sweep through Gaza, Syria and Bangladesh.”

 A tide of hogwash from so-called socialists who purport to educate the working class but can't even be trusted to know their left from right! 

On May 4, there was another kind of demonstration. On May 4, 1978 a young Bengali clothing worker called Altab Ali was stabbed to death by racists on Whitechapel Road. People gathered in the park which now bears his name, to mark the 35th anniversary of his death, which helped stimulate the big fightback in the area to drive the racists and fascists out. It was also inevitably an occasion to think about the hundreds of clothing workers killed in Bangladesh.  
 

The SWP must often have boasted, with whatever justification, of the part played by the Anti-Nazi League which it led in the fight against the fascists in the East End. Surprisingly, while getting carried away over taking part in a Jamaati march, Socialist Worker quite forgot to notice the Altab Ali event. 

It might be tempting to put this dalliance down to simple ignorance. We all make mistakes. But the SWP, even after its recent loss of members, has no shortage of educated people, professors and 'experts' on this or that country, even if it sometimes uses their dubious expertise only to explain why members should not get involved in say, solidarity with Bosnia, where people really were being persecuted as 'Muslim's, regardless of whether they were religious, or Darfur, where it explained that both sides were Muslim, as though this meant that massacres did not count.

I suspect some of the SWP's ordinary Asian members could tell it why it is wrong to support Jamaat e Islami, if it bothered to listen. As it is, with thousands of Bangladeshi workers having taken to the streets over the deaths in the factory collapse, Socialist Worker has had an article by someone in Bangladesh dealing with the isues of capitalist exploitation involved, and it has had a comment saying that if socialists there take up such issues they might win over people influenced by the religious right.

Very helpful advice, I am sure, like it used to tend to workers in Bosnia (though without actually speaking to any) that all would be well if only the workers could unite.  After all, you can't expect these people to work out these brilliant ideas for themselves.

And if you did, they might ask how it was that the advanced comrades in Britain could take their place on the same platform as people who cover for war crimes, including rape, demand a place for Allah restored in the constitution, and advocate the segregation of sexes, and denial of rights to Ahmadi Muslims, as well as the death penalty for atheists and 'blasphemers'.

But we must not be sectarians by reading the small print. It's tactics comrades!  Besides, there's not that many places willing to give the 'comrades' a platform these days.    

Jamata leader sentenced to death

Threats to Bangladeshi activists

Profiteers behind factory collapse

"London protest in solidarity with Bangladesh"