I’m white and working class. I’m sick of Brexiters saying they speak for me

Phil McDuff in The Guardian


Ordinary hard-working people have genuine concerns about immigration, and to ignore immigration is to undemocratically ignore their needs.” Other than the resurgent importance of jam, this is the clearest message we are supposed to take out of Brexit.

So concerned are we that the government’s hands are tied that it must send all the doctors back where they came from. It must crack down on students coming here to get educated in our universities in exchange for money. It must check teenagers’ teeth lest we accidentally extend compassion to a Syrian adult.

Who are “ordinary hard-working people” though? It seems the consensus following Brexit is that they’re the marginalised white working class; the people who have been left behind by modernity, who feel alienated by the “liberal metropolitan elite”. I’m a white man from the north-east, living in strongly Brexit-voting Middlesbrough, so you might expect me to tell you all off for looking down on us from your ivory towers. But the truth is that this outbreak of “the poor proles can’t help it” is both incorrect and patronising.

The working class mostly lack our own voices in the media. Instead, we are reported on. This reporting seems, even now, to believe that the true working-class identity is, as Kelvin MacKenzie put it in the 1980s, “a right old fascist”. Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him).

Migrants and native people of colour are stripped of their right to a working-class identity, and even cast as the enemy of the “real” (ie white) working class. I spoke to Marsha Garratt, a working-class, mixed-race woman who heads up the All In Youth Project, and she was cutting about the “underreporting of positive stories of solidarity between all members of the working class, including ethnic minorities”. Working-class history is migrant history, but we ignore that because it does not match what we believe to be authentic.

Likewise any of us who are white and born here, but refuse to blame migrants for the result of government policies, are cast as the “metropolitan elite” even if we’re earning the same amounts and living in the same towns. Working-class identity becomes necessarily and by definition anti-migrant.


We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf

Once everyone who doesn’t fit is excluded, those who remain are transformed from real people into weaponised stereotypes to be turned against those who resist the advance of jam-obsessed fascism. Even the complexity within people is stripped out as individuals are merged into a howling mass whom you must “understand” or risk losing your tolerant, liberal credentials.

We’re not the only people with concerns. It’s just that everyone else seems to have them on our behalf, out of the charity of their hearts. The white middle classes are just as likely to be disturbed by brown faces or foreign accents as the white working classes are, but they are generally educated enough to realise they can’t just come out and say it. Working-class poverty, framed as the result of the strains these new arrivals place on our generous social safety net, provides the cover for them to object to immigration even though they are unharmed by it. 

But our other “genuine concerns” – such as school and hospital funding, benefits and disability payments, the crushing of industries that formed the backbones of our local economies – are ignored or dismissed out of hand. They are cast as luxuries, an irresponsible “tax and spend” approach, or they are turned back on us as evidence of our own fecklessness and lack of ambition. When we say “we need benefits to live because you hollowed out our towns in pursuit of a flawed economic doctrine,” we are castigated for being workshy, and told we only have ourselves to blame. If we alter our complaints to blame foreign people it’s a different story. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all been sold to private landlords,” gets nothing. “I can’t get a council house because they’ve all gone to bloody Muslims,” gets on the front page of the tabloids.

Just as we are given identities as good or bad working-class people based on whether we adequately perform our roles as good little workers or whether we insolently insist on being disabled, unemployed or unionised, so our authenticity as working-class people depends on our use for political ends. Are we salt of the earth yeomen, or skiving thickos milking the system, or drains on the already stretched infrastructure? That all depends: are we kicking out immigrants or privatising a clinic today?

If we only matter to politicians when we can be used as to defend old bigotries about hordes of eastern Europeans stealing our women and poisoning our jam, then we don’t matter at all.

French Have My Condolences, Not My Apology

By Rana Ayyub in ndtv.com

This is not an angry letter, and if you insist it is, feel free to say that, for we seem to have a global consensus on free speech in a long time.

A  friend remarked in good humor hours after the firing at the French satirical newspaper "Why yaar, you Muslims kill all the time?" It was a remark made in good humour, she suggested, just as my friends in Class 5 would ask me, presumably in similar fun ribbing spirit, before an Indo- Pak cricket match "So Pakistan today, na?"

For the longest time, I have evaded questions on Islam on official fora.

My faith is a personal matter and sacrosanct. Having said that, I consider myself a proud Muslim. I have taken the most bigoted comments on my work in my stride though most of my investigations seen through the prism of religion, judging by the comments posted on my pieces and the reactions I provoke in person from people who discuss my work.

My reportage on fake encounters has been dissected with clinical precision, generating fury and an interrogation of my credentials, while my investigations on tribals and Dalits, for which I have received prestigious awards, have largely gone unnoticed by my critics and friends alike. 

As and when ignorant assumptions about my faith have been raised, I have, with the little knowledge of Islam imparted to me, mostly by my father, tried to clarify the misconceptions. 

My father belonged to the progressive writers' movement. While his Communist friends would cherish their whisky and cigar at mushairas or get-togethers in the 70s, he would sneak into a room with dimmed lights, offer his namaaz and then return to the soiree to exchange his qalaam (couplet).

For him, his namaaz was a private and personal affair, just like his decision to kindly refuse the alcohol served at such mehfils.

While he would never touch alcohol, there was never an attempt to influence his friends and seniors alike with his beliefs - the group included Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Ahmed Faraz amongst other liberal writers. 

His Islam and Koran began with the word "iqra" (read/recite). It was for this reason that the son of a zamindar chose to spend a good part of his career, till he retired, teaching at a government school in Mumbai, as opposed to reaping the profits of his family business. A majority of his students were non-Muslims.

We, a family of six, stayed in a one-room kitchen modest apartment in Mumbai, situated next to an RSS karyalaya, whose members chose to spend most afternoons with my abba, their 'Masterji', discussing worldly affairs.

Abba was popular as the Masterji who would get students admitted to his school, give free tuitions and make frequent visits to the shakhadespite his ideological differences with the RSS. On Guru Poornima, his was the first wrist which had the red thread tied on it by the shakhahead.

Diagonally opposite to our housing society was an Ayyappa mandir loved by my siblings and me for the jaggery prasadam. On occasions that we didn't make it there, the pujaari would send it home on a banana leaf. During the annual Ayyappa pooja, all the plants from our garden would be packed off to the mandir, and mom would help them connect their water pipes to our kitchen.

Such was the joy of being a part of a cosmopolitan country like India. 

When I write this today, every word seethes with frustration. Because, my identity today appears to have value only as a terror apologist, a Muslim who stands up to bigotry. I have to frame a politically-correct response post every terror attack, some allegedly by members of the Muslim community, and others where the perpetrators were clearly misguided Islamic fanatics who stand in absolute contradiction to everything believers like me have ever stood for.

It baffles me when I am singled out for an apology. I wonder if my Tamil friends have ever been asked to apologise for the terror acts of the LTTE, for the suicide bombings by the Tamil Tigers, including the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

It baffles me when Brahmins in the country are not singled out when a family of Dalit women is raped and murdered in broad daylight in Khairlanji, and when the upper caste commits atrocities on Dalits across the country in the name of faith.

It baffles me that never is a Christian looked at with suspicion or anger over the attacks on abortion clinics, or the seemingly placid acceptance of a white who goes on a shooting spree of innocent students, or a Jew asked to apologize over the carnage of Palestinians. Is an American asked to apologize for innocent Afghans and Iraqis killed by the US Army in collateral damage?

Why do you sit in assumption over my morals and my essential humanity when you call me and ask me, "So what do you think about that attack?"

Yes, I do not quite enjoy when a hundred school kids in Peshawar are brutally slaughtered in the name of faith. And, if you think Islam teaches this brutality, you are as misguided as them, perhaps why you and these terrorists could be in agreement over Islam.

I feel compelled - sometimes pressured - to tweet stories of the religious identity of the officer who died saving the lives of journalists in France. Why? 

Why am I forced to let everyone know that the employee of a kosher supermarket, who risked his life to save the lives of Jews from a desperate gunman, was a Muslim?

Why am I forced to post pictures of Muslims in France offering namaaz for the slain journalists?
 
Why am I forced to reiterate to my friends, "Hey, listen, the commanding officer in the final raid on the assailants was a Muslim"?

I am tired and embarrassed at having to reassert that my faith has nothing to do with the lunacy of some misguided rascals who claim to be protectors of my faith. They are as misguided as the Buddhist monks in Myanmar who are targeting Muslims in riots, the very idea being contradictory to the Buddhist faith.

Yes, I have stood against anti-Muslim bigotry and will continue to do so in the light of the events in present times and that does not translate into being a terrorist sympathizer. No, I am not a "moderate Muslim" because the term is insulting to my faith just as it would be to a Hindu or a Jew or a Sikh - any faith demands honesty and not a quantitaive assessment or degree of your belief in it.

As I write this today, I am also assured that bigotry and this mindless Islamophobia will not be allowed a free rein, and the front-runners who will defend my faith and its followers from this mindless hate will be non-Muslims.

It is heartening to see that for every Rupert Murdoch who gives voice to this pandemic bigotry, there are a hundred other journalists, activists, humanists across the globe who are fighting an unpopular battle each day to defend Muslims from this rampant prejudice.

As fellow journalist Owen Jones, from The Independent, who I greatly admire for his unrelenting journalistic crusade against bigotry, once wrote, "Those few of us with a public voice who defend Muslims from bigoted generalisations are currently fighting an unpopular battle. But it is the right thing to do, and history will absolve us."

Chav-bashing – a bad joke turning into bilious policy

It started as snobbery, but this week the idea that the poor are to blame for their plight may well become law

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Monday 7 January 2013

'In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a vicitm of forces beyond your control, but character failings'. Photograph: ALIKI SAPOUNTZI / aliki image li/Alamy

Six years ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about a phenomenon that had been bubbling away for a few years, and had started to become inescapable. It all seems rather quaint now: Prince William allegedly taking part in a "chav-themed fancy dress party" at Sandhurst; Oxford colleges hosting "chav bops"; the privately educated creators of Little Britain entertaining their devotees with comedic representations of the so-called underclass. But there it was: to be living on an estate, and in receipt of benefits, and possibly out of work, was to not just to be fair game for Oxford undergraduates, the future king and a certain kind of TV comedian, but the butt of a huge national joke. Some of us wondered where exactly what was briefly known as "The New Snobbery" was headed.

We now know. Its cultural aspects were merely the tip of the iceberg – as the Labour party engaged in the rebranding of social security as "welfare" and its ministers raged against "benefit cheats", something poisonous was being embedded at the core of our national life. While the Conservative party grimaced through a fleeting modernisation, it sat there, ready to be picked up by a Tory-led administration and taken to its logical conclusion.

Tuesday sees the Commons vote on the welfare uprating bill, via which the government wants to cap increases in working-age benefits at 1% and in the process portray Labour as – to quote the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley – the party of "skiving fat slobs". Throughout the coming year, the grim provisions of the Welfare Reform Act will be upon us, snatching away money from hundreds of thousands of people, and commencing the uncertain era of universal credit. It is a token of the government's agenda that in moving in on just about anyone who receives state help (apart from those electorally vital pensioners), they are simultaneously lionising hard-working families while snatching money off them – which is the basis of Labour's creditable opposition to the bill, though that does not quite let them off the hook. Most of the opposition seem incapable of challenging the "strivers v skivers" dichotomy, and are therefore leaving one modern shibboleth unchallenged: that even with swaths of the country economically dead, to be on out-of-work benefits is to be degenerate, and unable to grasp the soul-cleansing wonders of toil, however low paid.

Meanwhile, the same people who rage against the nanny state have become its loudest advocates. Last week, in partnership with a thinktank called the Local Government Information Unit, Westminster council came up with a report that was seemingly based on a neo-Hogarthian caricature of people on limited incomes – again, many of them actually in work. The text said this: "The increasing use of smart cards for access to leisure facilities, for instance, provides councils with a significant amount of data on usage patterns. Where an exercise package is prescribed to a resident, housing and council tax benefit payments could be varied to reward or incentivise residents." To translate: they should be able to pack anyone who is obese and on benefits off to the gym, on pain of having their money cut.

Just before Christmas, the Tory backbench MP Alec Shelbrooke issued a private member's bill proposing that all benefits aside from pensions and those covering disability be delivered via a "welfare cash card" that would only cover "priority purchases" and outlaw "luxury goods such as cigarettes, alcohol, Sky television and gambling". He was echoing noises made by people at the top of government: in June 2012, in a speech on future welfare reform, David Cameron floated the idea of paying benefits "in kind". Iain Duncan Smith is working on the same idea for "problem families". This is nothing to do with practical policy: it is about grandstanding on the basis of crass stereotypes, and the Victorian idea that only the affluent should be allowed pleasure – not to mention a weird definition of "luxury".

Last week came my favourite outburst so far. Free-market oracle John Redwood said in response to news that bookmakers are situating the majority of their addictive fixed-odds gambling machines in areas where most people don't have much money: "I put it down to the fact that poor people believe there's one shot to get rich. They put getting rich down to luck and think they can take a gamble. They also have time on their hands. My voters" – he's the MP for Wokingham, in Berkshire – "are too busy working hard to make a reasonable income." Note that distinction between people who are poor, and those who are "too busy working hard", as if he has not bothered to think about who it is who empties his office bin.

In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, there is the same belief, embodied in such government schemes as the Work Programme, that 40-plus years of deindustrialisation matters not, and to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a victim of forces beyond your control, but character failings.

This, it's often said, is what the majority of the public believe, but perhaps things are more complicated. Last week, the TUC put out the results of a survey by YouGov. On average, people apparently think 41% of the social security budget goes to those who are unemployed, and 27% is spent on fraudulent claims, whereas the true figures are 3% and 0.7% respectively. However, while 48% of people support the welfare uprating bill, 63% think benefits should go up in line with wages, prices or both. In other words, many people are confused, and their answers depend on how you phrase the questions. Funny, that.

You will not turn this unprecedented tide of nastiness and bigotry by using statistics. If it can be stopped, that will happen via arguments built on emotion, and a conversation about exactly what kind of country we ought to be. A shame, perhaps, that Rowan Williams has left Lambeth Palace: he did a pretty good job of opposing a lot of what the government was doing to the benefits system, and apparently brought most of his church with him. A pity, too, that whereas past attacks on the welfare state sparked revolts that were expressed culturally just as much as politically, people who write TV dramas, plays, songs and novels seem to have little interest in what's happening.

Over the next 12 months, some of the fundamentals of Britain's future will become clear. In the meantime, consider the words of writer and artist John Berger, written 20 or so years ago, but pertinent today: "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash."