Showing posts with label apartheid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apartheid. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 July 2024
Friday, 7 January 2022
Sunday, 24 December 2017
Who pays for Manchester City’s beautiful game?
Nick Cohen in The Guardian
Even though I come from the red side of Manchester, I want Manchester City to win every game they play now. Hoping City fail is like hoping a great singer’s voice cracks or prima ballerina’s tendons tear. Journalists have written and broadcast millions of words about the intensity of Manchester City’s game and the beauty of its movement. You watch and gasp as each perfect pass finds its man and each impossible move becomes possible after all.
Everything that can be said should have been said. But here are words you never hear on the BBC or Sky and hear only rarely from the best sports writers. Manchester City’s success is built on the labour extracted by the rulers of a modern feudal state. Sheikh Mansour, its owner, is the half-brother of Sheikh Khalifa, the absolute monarch of the United Arab Emirates: an accident of birth that has given him a mountain of cash and Manchester City the Premier League’s best players.
An absolute monarchy is merely a dictatorship decked in fine robes. The usual restrictions of free speech, a free press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and democratic elections still apply in the Emirates federation of seven sultanates. Critics are as likely to disappear or be held without due process as they are in less glamorous destinations. The riches that supply Pep Guardiola’s £15m salary and ensure the £264m wage bill for the players is met on time do not just come from oil. The Emirate monarchies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia rely on a system of economic exploitation you struggle to find a precedent for.
In the UAE as a whole, only 13% of the population are full nationals. In the glittering tourist resort of Dubai, citizenship rises slightly to 15% and in the Abu Dhabi emirate to 20%, but everywhere a subclass of immigrants does the bulk of the work. The obvious comparison is with apartheid: Arab nationals sit at the top, white expats have some privileges, as the coloureds and Asians had in the last days of the South African regime, while the dirty work – from construction to cleaning – is done by despised immigrants from south Asia.
But comparisons with apartheid or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or America’s old deep south miscarry because the Arab princelings import their working class rather than rule over subdued inhabitants. It’s like Spartans bringing in Helots. Or if images of stern Spartan militarists feel incongruous when imposed on the flabby bodies of Gulf aristocrats, Eloi importing Morlocks. Timid labour reforms are meant to have improved the lot of the serfs. In law, employers can no longer keep them in line with the threat of deportation to India or the Philippines if they do not please a capricious boss. In practice, absolute monarchies repress the lawyers and campaigners who might take up their cases. Now, as always, activists are silenced and workers fear the cost of speaking out.
You should be able to praise Manchester City’s football and condemn it owners. Or, if that is asking too much, you should at least be able to talk about its owners or mention the source of their wealth. If only in passing. If only the once. Instead, there is silence. With Mansour building a global consortium of clubs, Qataris owning Paris Saint-Germain and Emirate money poised to buy Newcastle United, rich dictatorial states are engaging in competitive conspicuous consumption. They are creating the world’s best clubs and may one day take them off into an oligarchs’ league. You are not “bringing politics into football” when you worry about Sheikh Mansour. You are recognising that the future of football is political.
The silence about the fate of the national game covers much of national life. Everywhere you look, you are struck by the arguments that are not being made.
Mainstream Conservatives refuse to join Tory rebels in speaking out against the dangers of Brexit. They like to boast that they are stable and commonsensical types, with no time for dangerous experiments. When confronted with the reckless nationalism of the Tory right, however, they prefer the safe option of keeping quiet until public opinion shifts. Many Labour MPs and leftwing journalists deplore Corbyn and the far left. I speak from experience when I say they talk with great eloquence in private, but will not utter a squeak of dissent in public until Corbyn’s popularity among party members falls. They, too, will speak out when, and only when, they can be certain that it is too late for speaking out to make a difference.
We think of ourselves as more liberated than our ancestors, but the same repressive mechanisms silence us. In the 18th and 19th centuries, few wanted to say that gorgeous stately homes and fine public buildings had been built because the British looted Indians and enslaved Africans. Today, it feels equally “inappropriate” – to use a modern word that stinks of Victorian prudery – to say that a beautiful football club has been built on the proceeds of exploitation.
Football supporters reserve their hatred for owners such as the Glazers, who bought Manchester United with borrowed money and siphoned off the club’s profits to pay down the debt. If billions are available to turn Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain into world-class clubs, the fans do not care where the money came from. Nor do neutrals who love football for its own sake. For them, it is as miserablist to talk about Manchester City’s owners on Match of the Day as to talk about the factory farming of turkeys at the Christmas lunch table.
Honest sports writers fear the accusation that they are joyless puritan nags whose sole pleasure is ruining the pleasure of others. In Britain’s vacuous politics, Conservatives fear accusations of ignoring the will of the people on Brexit. Labour MPs fear their activists rather than their voters. In both the Tory and Labour cases, the worst that can happen to MPs is deselection. Mail or Express journalists who came out against Brexit would, I imagine, risk their jobs or being moved on to a different story. But no leftwing paper would sack a columnist who criticised Corbyn. The worst they would endure is frosty words from line managers and twaddle on Twitter.
We do not live in Abu Dhabi. The police do not pick up dissidents. Jailers don’t torture them. Yet peer pressure and trivial fears are enough to suppress necessary arguments. If you do not yet have a New Year resolution, it’s worth resolving to treat both with the contempt they deserve.
Sunday, 22 October 2017
Oxbridge bashing is an empty ritual if we ignore wider social inequities
Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents.
There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.
The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.
For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.
When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.
Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)
There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.
It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.
But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.
We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.
We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.
Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.
The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.
Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.
But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.
The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?
There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?
Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.
Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.
The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents.
There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.
The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.
For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.
When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.
Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)
There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.
It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.
But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.
We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.
We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.
Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.
The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.
Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.
But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.
The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?
There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?
Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.
Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.
Monday, 20 March 2017
Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality
Jo Littler in The Guardian
We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers!” shouted Donald Trump in his first address to Congress last month, before announcing that tighter immigration controls would take the form of a “merit-based” system.
Like so many before him, Trump was wrapping political reforms in the language of meritocracy, conjuring up the image of a “fair” system where people are free to work hard to activate their talent and climb the ladder of success.
Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has also promised to make Britain “the world’s great meritocracy” (or, in The Sun’s phrase, a “Mayritocracy”). She reiterated this pledge when announcing her revival of the grammar schools system, abandoned in the 1960s. “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege,” she proclaimed, “where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, many people noticed that the meritocracy they had been taught to believe in wasn’t working. The idea you could be anything you wanted to be, if only you tried hard enough, was increasingly hard to swallow. Even for the relatively pampered middle classes, jobs had dried up, become downgraded and over-pressured, debt had soared and housing was increasingly unaffordable.
Even Thatcher presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility
This social context, created through 40 years of neoliberalism, was reflected on TV: in Breaking Bad, being brilliant at chemistry was not enough to guarantee mainstream career progression or even survival; the evisceration of social support was the backdrop to The Wire; and the precarious creative labour depicted in Girls was very different to the glamorous stability shown a decade earlier in Sex and the City.
In the face of this instability, May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality. They use different cultural accents: Trump’s brash rhetoric panders overtly to racism and misogyny; May presents herself as a fair-minded headmistress of the home counties. But their political logic is intertwined, as indicated by the indecent haste with which May rushed to the White House post-election. Both acknowledge inequality but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the solution. Both want to create economic havens for the uber-rich while deepening the marketisation of public welfare systems and extending the logic of competition in everyday life.
When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.
‘May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed, arguing in a 1958 essay: “Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality … no less than any other oligarchy.” She was particularly disparaging about the UK’s introduction of grammar schools and its institutional segregation of children according to one narrow measure of “ability”. This subject also troubled the social democratic polymath Michael Young, whose 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy used the M-word in an affably disparaging fashion. The first half of his book outlined the rise of democracy; the second told the story of a dystopian, meritocratic future complete with black market trade in brainy babies.
But in 1972, Young’s friend the American sociologist Daniel Bell gave the concept a more positive spin when he suggested that meritocracy might actually be a productive engine for the new “knowledge economy”. By the 1980s the word was being used approvingly by a range of new-right thinktanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. The word meritocracy had flipped in meaning.
Over the past few decades, neoliberal meritocracy has been characterised by two key features. First, the sheer scale of its attempt to extend entrepreneurial competition into the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Second, the power it has gathered by drawing from 20th-century movements for equality. Meritocracy has been presented as a means of breaking down established hierarchies of privilege.
Even Margaret Thatcher, despite her social conservatism, presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility. Under New Labour, meritocracy embraced social liberalism, rejecting homophobia, sexism and racism. Now, we were told, really anyone could “make it”.
Those who did “make it” – the enterprising mumpreneur, the black vlogger, the council estate boy-turned-CEO – were spotlighted as parables of progress. But climbing up the social ladder became an increasing individualised matter, and as the rich got richer the ladders became longer. Those who didn’t make it were ignored or positioned as having personally failed. Under the coalition and Conservative governments, meritocratic yearning took a more punitive turn. In David Cameron’s “aspiration nation”, you were either a striver or a skiver; the very act of hoping to reach upwards became a moral obligation. Those who could not draw on existing reservoirs of privilege were told to worker harder to catch up.
The fact is, meritocracy is a myth. Social systems that reward through wealth, and which increase inequality, don’t aid social mobility, and people pass on their privilege to their children. The Conservatives have made this situation far worse by raising the inheritance tax threshold. And their reintroduction of grammar schools would involve using extremely narrow educational measures to divide children and to privilege the already privileged (often with the help of expensive private tutors). As the geographer Danny Dorling has said, it is a system of “educational apartheid”.
“Merit” itself, moreover, is a malleable, easily manipulated term. The American scholar Lani Guinier has shown how, in the 1920s, Harvard University curbed the number of Jewish students admitted by stipulating a new form of “merit”: that of “well-rounded character”. A more recent example was supplied by the reality TV filmmaking contest Project Greenlight, in which the white actor Matt Damon repeatedly interrupted black producer Effie Brown to tell her that diversity wasn’t important in film production: decisions, he explained, have to be “based entirely on merit”. This “Damonsplaining” was widely ridiculed on social media (“Can Matt Damon tell me why the caged bird sings?”). But it illustrated how versions of “merit” can be used to ingrain privilege – unlike clear criteria for specific roles, combined with anti-discrimination policies.
It is not hard to see why people find the idea of meritocracy appealing: it carries with it the idea of moving beyond where you start in life, of creative flourishing and fairness. But all the evidence shows it is a smokescreen for inequality. As Trump, May and their supporters attempt to resurrect it, there has never been a better moment to bury meritocracy for ever.
We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers!” shouted Donald Trump in his first address to Congress last month, before announcing that tighter immigration controls would take the form of a “merit-based” system.
Like so many before him, Trump was wrapping political reforms in the language of meritocracy, conjuring up the image of a “fair” system where people are free to work hard to activate their talent and climb the ladder of success.
Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has also promised to make Britain “the world’s great meritocracy” (or, in The Sun’s phrase, a “Mayritocracy”). She reiterated this pledge when announcing her revival of the grammar schools system, abandoned in the 1960s. “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege,” she proclaimed, “where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, many people noticed that the meritocracy they had been taught to believe in wasn’t working. The idea you could be anything you wanted to be, if only you tried hard enough, was increasingly hard to swallow. Even for the relatively pampered middle classes, jobs had dried up, become downgraded and over-pressured, debt had soared and housing was increasingly unaffordable.
Even Thatcher presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility
This social context, created through 40 years of neoliberalism, was reflected on TV: in Breaking Bad, being brilliant at chemistry was not enough to guarantee mainstream career progression or even survival; the evisceration of social support was the backdrop to The Wire; and the precarious creative labour depicted in Girls was very different to the glamorous stability shown a decade earlier in Sex and the City.
In the face of this instability, May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality. They use different cultural accents: Trump’s brash rhetoric panders overtly to racism and misogyny; May presents herself as a fair-minded headmistress of the home counties. But their political logic is intertwined, as indicated by the indecent haste with which May rushed to the White House post-election. Both acknowledge inequality but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the solution. Both want to create economic havens for the uber-rich while deepening the marketisation of public welfare systems and extending the logic of competition in everyday life.
When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.
‘May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed, arguing in a 1958 essay: “Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality … no less than any other oligarchy.” She was particularly disparaging about the UK’s introduction of grammar schools and its institutional segregation of children according to one narrow measure of “ability”. This subject also troubled the social democratic polymath Michael Young, whose 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy used the M-word in an affably disparaging fashion. The first half of his book outlined the rise of democracy; the second told the story of a dystopian, meritocratic future complete with black market trade in brainy babies.
But in 1972, Young’s friend the American sociologist Daniel Bell gave the concept a more positive spin when he suggested that meritocracy might actually be a productive engine for the new “knowledge economy”. By the 1980s the word was being used approvingly by a range of new-right thinktanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. The word meritocracy had flipped in meaning.
Over the past few decades, neoliberal meritocracy has been characterised by two key features. First, the sheer scale of its attempt to extend entrepreneurial competition into the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Second, the power it has gathered by drawing from 20th-century movements for equality. Meritocracy has been presented as a means of breaking down established hierarchies of privilege.
Even Margaret Thatcher, despite her social conservatism, presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility. Under New Labour, meritocracy embraced social liberalism, rejecting homophobia, sexism and racism. Now, we were told, really anyone could “make it”.
Those who did “make it” – the enterprising mumpreneur, the black vlogger, the council estate boy-turned-CEO – were spotlighted as parables of progress. But climbing up the social ladder became an increasing individualised matter, and as the rich got richer the ladders became longer. Those who didn’t make it were ignored or positioned as having personally failed. Under the coalition and Conservative governments, meritocratic yearning took a more punitive turn. In David Cameron’s “aspiration nation”, you were either a striver or a skiver; the very act of hoping to reach upwards became a moral obligation. Those who could not draw on existing reservoirs of privilege were told to worker harder to catch up.
The fact is, meritocracy is a myth. Social systems that reward through wealth, and which increase inequality, don’t aid social mobility, and people pass on their privilege to their children. The Conservatives have made this situation far worse by raising the inheritance tax threshold. And their reintroduction of grammar schools would involve using extremely narrow educational measures to divide children and to privilege the already privileged (often with the help of expensive private tutors). As the geographer Danny Dorling has said, it is a system of “educational apartheid”.
“Merit” itself, moreover, is a malleable, easily manipulated term. The American scholar Lani Guinier has shown how, in the 1920s, Harvard University curbed the number of Jewish students admitted by stipulating a new form of “merit”: that of “well-rounded character”. A more recent example was supplied by the reality TV filmmaking contest Project Greenlight, in which the white actor Matt Damon repeatedly interrupted black producer Effie Brown to tell her that diversity wasn’t important in film production: decisions, he explained, have to be “based entirely on merit”. This “Damonsplaining” was widely ridiculed on social media (“Can Matt Damon tell me why the caged bird sings?”). But it illustrated how versions of “merit” can be used to ingrain privilege – unlike clear criteria for specific roles, combined with anti-discrimination policies.
It is not hard to see why people find the idea of meritocracy appealing: it carries with it the idea of moving beyond where you start in life, of creative flourishing and fairness. But all the evidence shows it is a smokescreen for inequality. As Trump, May and their supporters attempt to resurrect it, there has never been a better moment to bury meritocracy for ever.
Thursday, 14 January 2016
Amla's ideal
Mark Nicholas in Cricinfo
"I thought I could add value and I'd like to believe I have added value. I'm really surprised some people have suggested it was not my choice. You don't look like me in this world without being firm on what you want to do." - Hashim Amla, one week ago
There was something almost chilling about it: "In this world." An unfair world. A world where Muslims are mistrusted because a radical few threaten the perception of a beautiful faith. Amla's journey has long been challenged. The beard. The objection to wearing a beer sponsor's endorsement. Apartheid. That backlift! And more. Yes, a singular man.
To relinquish the cricket captaincy of your country is a painful thing. Many have shed tears. Many more have felt the sweat from their neck and the quiver of their lip. A lifetime's ambition tossed away out of choice.
But neither the many, nor the many more, have had as much at stake as Amla. He stands for an ideal. He speaks for the marginalised. He is hope. He is strength. He is faith. His elevation made all things possible. But he chose to give it away. He confirmed this invasive and weighty position was not for him.
Of course he added value. Each moment spent with Amla is valuable. His calm is an ever- present, a blessing. He speaks wisely and on an even keel. Amla will tell you that it is never as good as you think it is and it is never as bad as you think it is. In the age of confident youth, his counsel is worth its weight in runs.
The trouble was, no runs. A period of famine at a time of defeats withers the mind. For South Africa, the runs mattered most. Thus, on top of the sheer overload of responsibility came the fear of failure. It is a captain's bad dream. Silly, really. Years of dreams to get you there and then night after night with dreams that examine your ability to cope.
Probably - and this notion comes without evidence - Amla was the choice for a nation that needed his background to make a statement. Transformation comes in many forms but if the leader represents its credentials, the on-sell is more straightforward. AB de Villiers was one choice, Amla the other. If the choice is too difficult to call, go with the better messenger. Better still go with Amla, who is the message. In his heart he must have known this. What a burden.
He did just fine, representing his people with honour and commitment. He had some bowlers, though not the depth of attack given to his predecessors. He won some series and then came badly undone in India, a spill that cost his country the treasured record of not having lost away from home since 2006.
The clue to his mind was in the way it applied itself to batting. In India, all he could dare was frozen defence. Set free, few men have used a bat to express themselves so accurately. Amla has an untroubled rhythm and flow. He plays thoughtful innings that reach crescendos and then return to their foundations so that each part is rebuilt in the anticipation of overwhelming performance. These innings adapt to their environment and to the format for which they are intended. In them he unites South African discipline with Asian flair, and vice versa - the perfect hybrid. But in India there was none of this. Indeed, he appeared broken. Against the spinning ball on pitches of wretched bounce, block after rigid block tortured his soul.
He might have survived his own assessment had the first Test against England, in Durban, been less stressful, or simply had a better result. But no. He was back in India, fighting to survive something he knew was lost. And that something was his conviction that he could do the job better than the next man. Without it, the game was up. At the press conference announcing closure, he said as much.
It might seem odd that he stood down having made 200 in Cape Town and saved the game. But he made 200 because he had already released his mind. In a single decision he had come from unbearable weight to the lightness of being. No mask, no message, just an innings with clear purpose and a rewarding conclusion.
Much is asked of international captains. Some treat these questions lightly; Brendon McCullum for example. Others wear them better than imagined; Misbah-ul-Haq for sure. One or two close shop: MS Dhoni is a man of smoke and mirrors. A few bunker down and later emerge rebooted: Alastair Cook. Occasionally a heart is worn magnificently on its sleeve: think Graeme Smith.
Smith's part in the new age of South African cricket is a remarkable sporting story. By his own estimation, it took five years to be any good at the job. In that time he learned more about himself than he thought was there. He was utterly without prejudice and therefore above suspicion. He was able to separate political issues from performance; to forgive if not forget; to rally and to cry. He spoke comfortably of shortcomings and shrewdly of ambition. Perhaps most notably, he converted a suspect and awkward batting technique into a mechanism for sustainable and substantial run-making.
Amla must have wondered how on earth he did it all. But there was a difference. Smith represented something already there. Amla was the chosen face of something long fought for but still not achieved. About that there remains great bitterness. So much so that cricketers of the past - those who represented South Africa before and during isolation - are not recognised by the regime of the present. I'll wager Amla hates that every bit as much as Smith mourns it. In the world occupied by the two most recent out-going South African cricket captains, all men are equal.
While Haroon Lorgat, the CEO of Cricket South Africa, resolutely denies quotas at international level, the agenda is clear. But it is not organic. In a Machiavellian way, Amla was a ticket. De Villiers is not. South African cricket is at the crossroads. The next route taken may define its place at the top table of the game. Amla simply could not reconcile such a responsibility alongside the need to win tosses and take a gamble; give speeches; make life-changing decisions for and about players; hold catches; stop boundaries; score runs and sleep tight.
His decision was made for the greater good and for personal harmony. It is a brave thing to abandon a dream. And a smart thing. His stock has risen and his impression will hold firm. De Villiers is a wonderful alternative and his voice must be heard. South African cricket is lucky to have such men in their ranks. It would be wise to give them equal standing and a decisive say in the future.
Meanwhile, the former captain's resilience and clarity have made South Africa stronger than a week ago. England will be more than aware of this.
"I thought I could add value and I'd like to believe I have added value. I'm really surprised some people have suggested it was not my choice. You don't look like me in this world without being firm on what you want to do." - Hashim Amla, one week ago
There was something almost chilling about it: "In this world." An unfair world. A world where Muslims are mistrusted because a radical few threaten the perception of a beautiful faith. Amla's journey has long been challenged. The beard. The objection to wearing a beer sponsor's endorsement. Apartheid. That backlift! And more. Yes, a singular man.
To relinquish the cricket captaincy of your country is a painful thing. Many have shed tears. Many more have felt the sweat from their neck and the quiver of their lip. A lifetime's ambition tossed away out of choice.
But neither the many, nor the many more, have had as much at stake as Amla. He stands for an ideal. He speaks for the marginalised. He is hope. He is strength. He is faith. His elevation made all things possible. But he chose to give it away. He confirmed this invasive and weighty position was not for him.
Of course he added value. Each moment spent with Amla is valuable. His calm is an ever- present, a blessing. He speaks wisely and on an even keel. Amla will tell you that it is never as good as you think it is and it is never as bad as you think it is. In the age of confident youth, his counsel is worth its weight in runs.
The trouble was, no runs. A period of famine at a time of defeats withers the mind. For South Africa, the runs mattered most. Thus, on top of the sheer overload of responsibility came the fear of failure. It is a captain's bad dream. Silly, really. Years of dreams to get you there and then night after night with dreams that examine your ability to cope.
Probably - and this notion comes without evidence - Amla was the choice for a nation that needed his background to make a statement. Transformation comes in many forms but if the leader represents its credentials, the on-sell is more straightforward. AB de Villiers was one choice, Amla the other. If the choice is too difficult to call, go with the better messenger. Better still go with Amla, who is the message. In his heart he must have known this. What a burden.
He did just fine, representing his people with honour and commitment. He had some bowlers, though not the depth of attack given to his predecessors. He won some series and then came badly undone in India, a spill that cost his country the treasured record of not having lost away from home since 2006.
The clue to his mind was in the way it applied itself to batting. In India, all he could dare was frozen defence. Set free, few men have used a bat to express themselves so accurately. Amla has an untroubled rhythm and flow. He plays thoughtful innings that reach crescendos and then return to their foundations so that each part is rebuilt in the anticipation of overwhelming performance. These innings adapt to their environment and to the format for which they are intended. In them he unites South African discipline with Asian flair, and vice versa - the perfect hybrid. But in India there was none of this. Indeed, he appeared broken. Against the spinning ball on pitches of wretched bounce, block after rigid block tortured his soul.
He might have survived his own assessment had the first Test against England, in Durban, been less stressful, or simply had a better result. But no. He was back in India, fighting to survive something he knew was lost. And that something was his conviction that he could do the job better than the next man. Without it, the game was up. At the press conference announcing closure, he said as much.
It might seem odd that he stood down having made 200 in Cape Town and saved the game. But he made 200 because he had already released his mind. In a single decision he had come from unbearable weight to the lightness of being. No mask, no message, just an innings with clear purpose and a rewarding conclusion.
Much is asked of international captains. Some treat these questions lightly; Brendon McCullum for example. Others wear them better than imagined; Misbah-ul-Haq for sure. One or two close shop: MS Dhoni is a man of smoke and mirrors. A few bunker down and later emerge rebooted: Alastair Cook. Occasionally a heart is worn magnificently on its sleeve: think Graeme Smith.
Smith's part in the new age of South African cricket is a remarkable sporting story. By his own estimation, it took five years to be any good at the job. In that time he learned more about himself than he thought was there. He was utterly without prejudice and therefore above suspicion. He was able to separate political issues from performance; to forgive if not forget; to rally and to cry. He spoke comfortably of shortcomings and shrewdly of ambition. Perhaps most notably, he converted a suspect and awkward batting technique into a mechanism for sustainable and substantial run-making.
Amla must have wondered how on earth he did it all. But there was a difference. Smith represented something already there. Amla was the chosen face of something long fought for but still not achieved. About that there remains great bitterness. So much so that cricketers of the past - those who represented South Africa before and during isolation - are not recognised by the regime of the present. I'll wager Amla hates that every bit as much as Smith mourns it. In the world occupied by the two most recent out-going South African cricket captains, all men are equal.
While Haroon Lorgat, the CEO of Cricket South Africa, resolutely denies quotas at international level, the agenda is clear. But it is not organic. In a Machiavellian way, Amla was a ticket. De Villiers is not. South African cricket is at the crossroads. The next route taken may define its place at the top table of the game. Amla simply could not reconcile such a responsibility alongside the need to win tosses and take a gamble; give speeches; make life-changing decisions for and about players; hold catches; stop boundaries; score runs and sleep tight.
His decision was made for the greater good and for personal harmony. It is a brave thing to abandon a dream. And a smart thing. His stock has risen and his impression will hold firm. De Villiers is a wonderful alternative and his voice must be heard. South African cricket is lucky to have such men in their ranks. It would be wise to give them equal standing and a decisive say in the future.
Meanwhile, the former captain's resilience and clarity have made South Africa stronger than a week ago. England will be more than aware of this.
Friday, 29 May 2015
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Did an undercover cop help organise a major riot?
Protesters attack a McDonald's in the City of London during the J18 Carnival Against Global Capitalism on 18 June 1999. Photograph: Sinead Lynch/EPA
From the Stephen Lawrence inquiry we learned that the police were institutionally racist. Can it be long before we learn that they are also institutionally corrupt? Almost every month the undercover policing scandal becomes wider and deeper. Today I can reveal a new twist, which in some respects could be the gravest episode yet. It surely makes the case for an independent public inquiry – which is already overwhelming – unarguable.
Before I explain it, here's a summary of what we know already. Thanks to the remarkable investigations pursued first by the victims of police spies and then by the Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis (whose book Undercover is as gripping as any thriller), we know that British police have been inserting undercover officers into protest movements since 1968. Their purpose was to counter what they called subversion or domestic extremism, which they define as seeking to "prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy … outside the normal democratic process". Which is a good description of how almost all progressive change happens.
Most of the groups whose infiltration has now been exposed were non-violent. Among them were the British campaign against apartheid in South Africa, the protest movements against climate change, people seeking to expose police corruption and the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Undercover officers, often using the stolen identities of dead children, worked their way into key positions and helped to organise demonstrations. Several started long-term relationships with the people they spied on. At least two fathered children with them.
Some officers illegally used their false identities in court. Some acted as agents provocateurs. Seldom did they appear to be operating in the wider interests of society. They collected intelligence on trade unionists that was passed to an agency which compiled unlawful blacklists for construction companies, ensuring that those people could not find work. The policeman who infiltrated the Stephen Lawrence campaign was instructed by his superiors to "hunt for disinformation" about the family and their supporters that could be used to undermine them. When their tour of duty was over, the police abandoned their partners and their assumed identities and disappeared, leaving a trail of broken lives. As the unofficial motto of the original undercover squad stated, it would operate By Any Means Necessary.
The revelations so far have led to 56 people having their cases or convictions overturned, after police and prosecutors failed to disclose that officers had helped to plan and execute the protests for which people were being prosecuted. But we know the names of only 11 spies, out of 100-150, working for 46 years. Thousands of people might have been falsely prosecuted.
So far there have been 15 official inquiries and investigations. They seem to have served only to delay and distract. The report by Sir Christopher Rose into the false convictions of a group of climate change protesters concluded that failures by police and prosecutors to disclose essential information to the defence "were individual, not systemic" and that "nothing that I have seen or heard suggests that … there was any deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information". Now, after an almost identical case involving another group of climate activists, during which the judge remarked that there had been "a complete and total failure" to disclose evidence, Rose's findings look incredible.
The biggest inquiry still running, Operation Herne, is investigating alleged misconduct by the Metropolitan police. Of its 44 staff, 75% work for, er, the Metropolitan police. Its only decisive action so far has been to seek evidence for a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act of Peter Francis, the police whistleblower who has revealed key elements of this story. This looks like an attempt to discourage him from testifying, and to prevent other officers from coming forward.
Bad enough? You haven't heard the half of it. Last week, the activist John Jordan was told his conviction (for occupying the offices of London Transport) would be overturned. The Crown Prosecution Service refuses to reveal why, but it doubtless has something to do with the fact that one of Jordan's co-defendants turns out to have been Jim Boyling, a secret policeman working for the Met, who allegedly used his false identity in court.
Jordan has now made a further claim. He alleges that the same man helped organise a street party that went wrong and turned into the worst riot in London since the poll tax demonstrations. The J18 Carnival Against Global Capitalism on 18 June 1999 went well beyond non-violent protest. According to the police, 42 people were injured and over £1m of damage was done. One building was singled out: the London International Financial Futures Exchange (Liffe), where derivatives were traded. Though protesters entered the building at 1.40pm, the police did not arrive until 4.15pm.
After furious recriminations from the Lord Mayor and the people who ran the Liffe building, the City of London police conducted an inquiry. It admitted that their criticisms were justified, and that the police's performance was "highly unsatisfactory". The problem, it claimed, was that the police had no information about what the targets and plans of the protesters would be, and had no idea that Liffe was in the frame. The riot was "unforeseen".
Jordan was a member of "the logistics group that organised the tactics for J18. There were about 10 of us in the group and we met weekly for over six months." Among the other members, he says, was Boyling. "The 10 of us … were the only people who knew the whole plan before the day itself and who had decided that the main target would be Liffe." Boyling, he alleges, drove one of the two cars that were used to block the road to the building.
It is hard to think of a more serious allegation. For six months an undercover officer working for the Metropolitan police was instrumental in planning a major demonstration, which ended up causing injuries and serious damage to property. Yet the police appear to have failed to pass this intelligence to the City of London force, leaving the target of the protest unprotected.
Still no need for an independent public inquiry? Really?
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Follow Mandela's example, and roar with laughter at all this rightwing fawning
Illustration by Andrzej Krauze
Asked for his feelings on meeting the Spice Girls in 1997 – shortly after Mel B had compared their "girl power quest" with the anti-apartheid movement – Nelson Mandela obliged. "I don't want to be emotional," he explained, "but this is one of the greatest moments of my life."
The twinkly-eyed gag was taken at face value by the group and plenty of dullard commentators, who were bemused, when they should simply have been amused. Mandela was a very funny man. In fact, every time I read the remark again I find myself laughing – not at Geri et al, which says something about how Mandela elevates even the cynical, but with him, who somehow contrived to tread the most elegant path through the unique absurdities of much of his later existence.
Less adroit, it must be said, are many of those lumbering to salute him in death – a global throng of Zeligs, from politicians to press, whose lifelong reverence for Mandela as a man and leader of a struggle was simply failed by the greatest superlatives. How on earth did apartheid endure so long, younger viewers may be wondering, considering everyone who was anyone seems to have been on Mandela's side?
"Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time," intoned David Cameron, who went off on a jolly to apartheid South Africa in 1989, with all expenses paid by a firm lobbying against sanctions. " President Mandela was one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time," declared George W Bush, neglecting to mention that the ANC were still on a US terror-watch list until 2008, which meant the secretary of state had to certify that Mandela was not a terrorist in order for him to visit the country.
You have to laugh – mostly because that is probably what Mandela would have done. How often photos showed him roaring with laughter next to fawning leaders or dignitaries or whoever wanted a piece of him that day. I always imagined him getting the cosmic joke of it all – here he was, feted often by people who either couldn't have given a toss in his darkest times, or had transparently wished him ill.
Sainthood can be very sanitising, of course, and the right have a vested interest in smothering the realities of Mandela's radicalism under a lead blanket of tributes. But Mandela not only made history, he also did so in such a way that he made others wish to rewrite their own histories. In some cases, they seem to have done this because the argument against apartheid – and it actually was a matter of debate for plenty of people at the time, kids – was won so totally that to retrospectively admit in public that you were on the wrong side of it, or in effect on the fence, became akin to saying you were as politically witless as you were wicked.
Others have since discovered misty-eyed pasts. Not long ago, I asked Nigel Farage if Nelson Mandela was a political hero, on the basis that he has to be everyone's these days. "He's a human hero," the Ukip leader replied reverentially. "That day he came out of Robben Island" – it wasn't Robben Island, but anyway – "and stood there and forgave everybody, I just thought: 'This is Jesus.'"
Now, Farage was a rightwing Conservative activist in 1990, and doubtless it was uncharitable of me to think it odd that he should have thought about Mandela in those terms at that time, considering it would have been bizarrely uncharacteristic of his tribe (it wasn't awfully long after the Federation of Conservative Students used to wear Hang Mandela badges, while in the US the likes of Dick Cheney were voting against resolutions calling for his release). But more importantly, my scepticism – for which there was absolutely no evidence, I should say – was irrelevant. The point was that Farage believed he had thought that, and it is part of his personal folklore.
It's not just politicians, naturally. All self-respecting self-regarders jostled to touch Mandela's robe. At a 90th birthday party in London, Elton John sang a worshipful Happy Birthday to him – a track that presumably wasn't on the set list when Elton played Sun City in 1983. "My respects to an extraordinary person, probably one of the greatest humanists of our time," declared Thursday's tribute from Sepp Blatter, the man who demanded the frail elder statesman present himself at the World Cup final in South Africa, to the vocal distress of Mandela's family given he was mourning the tragic death of his 13-year-old great-granddaughter.
"Death of a colossus," was the headline in yesterday's Daily Mail, who marked his 1990 release with "The violent homecoming". "Violence and death disfigured the release of Nelson Mandela yesterday …" began that take on history.
They all came round in the end. Lesser people – minuscule folk such as myself, in fact – would occasionally have felt overwhelmed with the urge to inquire, even smilingly: "Well, where the hell were you when I was rotting in a cell for the best part of 30 years?" But in his superhuman magnanimity, Mandela never once mentioned it. So to follow his example in an infinitely smaller way, perhaps we should just roar with laughter ourselves at all the rightwing Mandela-venerators crawling out of the woodwork to weave themselves into his achievements. Such monumental progress could only be achieved by someone with the grace to understand a political reality: it is better that Johnny should come lately than not at all.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Just remember what many Tories thought of Nelson Mandela in the apartheid years
Soon we will be inundated with heartfelt speeches – but we mustn't let those who opposed Mandela's struggle pretend they didn't
A smile that came from the centre of the Earth ... Nelson Mandela. Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images
As the vigil continues outside the hospital, we don't know how close to the final freedom Nelson Mandela is. But after the strange denials that this old, sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power. Before the pygmy politicians line up to pay tribute to this giant, I want to remember how he lived so much for so many. Part of my memory is that he was not a living saint to the very people whose staff will now be writing their "heartfelt" speeches.
Really, I have no desire to hear them from leaders of parties who described his organisation as terrorist, who believed that sanctions were wrong, whose jolly young members wore T-shirts demanding he be strung up. Of course, not all Tories were pro-apartheid, but I can already feel the revisionism revving up.
So we must recall how it really was. The struggle against apartheid was the one thing that unified the left. I came to it accidentally. Isn't that how politicisation happens sometimes? Via extraordinary people, unlikely meetings, chance encounters?
Like this one: in 1981 I had just come back from travelling around South America and got a job in a care home with Haringey Social Services in north London. Some of the local kids were in big trouble – the girls were on the game at 14, the boys breaking into houses and stealing cars. A large, in every sense of the word, African woman became my ally there. She was always encouraging them to be lawyers despite their constant truanting. We were an unlikely pair, but she believed in "discipline" and I believed in "manners" so we would talk late into the night. She was one of the poshest people I had ever met – she drank Perrier water, which at that time was exotic beyond belief. Sometimes she would weep after receiving calls from South Africa and talk of murders and assassinations. Sometimes she would take me out for cocktails and get diplomatic cars from embassies to take me home. Her name was Adelaide Tambo, the wife of Oliver. They were the exiled leaders of the ANC.
I began to know what this meant. How Mandela had ridden to power in 1952 in the Defiance Campaign, how he was harassed and, of course, finally taken to Robben Island. To that tiny cell. The Tambos had to leave much later. One night she called me as she was locked out of her house in Muswell Hill. "Can't you just break a window? "No Suzanne," she said. "The windows are all bullet proof glass." That's how they lived.
This personal introduction to the ANC is my story but everyone I knew opposed apartheid. Indeed, who could support such barbarism? This was more than racism – there is only one race, called the human race. Botha's regime did not regard black people as humans but as animals.
By 1984 Jerry Dammers had written Free Nelson Mandela. But apartheid continued to exist, propped up by the Tories. Some of their elder statesmen, such as Norman Tebbit, still see Thatcher's policy as a success. David Cameron denounced it in 2006, saying she had been wrong to condemn the ANC as terrorists and to have opposed sanctions. Too late for those veteran campaigners such as Peter Hain, who had seen the massacres in the townships and knew it was a life-or-death struggle.
Indeed, when I saw Mandela in later years having his garden surreally being "made over" by Alan Titchmarsh or being cuddled by random Spice Girls, I wondered if they had ever heard Gil Scott-Heron's Johannesburg (1975) or been at the anti-apartheid demos outside the South African embassy where we were all kettled.
When we hear Cameron's inevitable tribute, don't forget that in 1989, aged 23, he went on a "jolly" to South Africa paid for by a firm that did not want sanctions busted. This does not mean he supported apartheid, but by then it would have been impossible not to know of the regime's brutality. Many people knew, and boyotted South African goods.
I see Dylan Jones, a Cameron fan, has written a book on Live Aid, defining the 80s as caring: more anodyne revision. The key concert of the 80s was the more political and consciousness-raising Free Nelson Mandela one, not long after. Mandela himself was there on stage with that smile that came from the centre of the Earth. The glare of his grin made us cheer and cry. The glare of the sun, when he was breaking rocks in Robben Island, had permanently damaged his eyesight, but not his mind. When he walked to freedom he wrote, that unless he left bitterness and hatred behind, "I would still be in prison."
This is wonderful, but do not let his story be rewritten, do not let those who opposed his struggle pretend they didn't.
"There is no passion to be found playing small," he said. He told his own people to recall the past. I ask simply, before we are inundated with those who want to bask in his afterglow, that we remember our own past too. It is sad, but let him go. I just wanted to remind you of how it was before he passes and before the "official" rewrite of history begins. Forgiveness is possible. Forgetting isn't.
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