Rock Against Racism

Is the government being completely honest in the rhetoric it uses to justify its open-door policy for immigrants from the former eastern bloc?
Hazel Blears, in her visit to Boston in Lincolnshire, focused on busting the myths around immigration, the myths that immigrants are a burden and the myths surrounding immigrants and crime, social housing, social security and health. But she doesn't mention inflation.
The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, however, was clear about one of the main benefits of the recent immigration:
"Immigration has reduced wage inflation. The inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from Eastern Europe, has probably led to a diminution of inflationary pressure on the labour market."
Gordon Brown makes no mention of this economic benefit when he announced his refusal to cap immigration this April. Controlling inflation is one of the holy grails of economists like Brown; you would think he would single it out.
And it is also ironic that, together with their work ethic, some of the new east European immigrants also bring with them the same unreformed attitudes towards race, which Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League fought so hard to eliminate. Then it was the National Front. Now it’s the BNP.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was living in Oxford, we weren't thinking about the advantages of immigration to employers and how immigration prevents wage-led inflation and creates flexible labour markets.
At a time when the National Front was getting stronger, Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League helped to change the attitudes of a lot of young people in London and the rest of Britain and make racism and fascism deeply unfashionable.
Music and the NME lead the way. Musicians like the Clash, Tom Robinson, Elvis Costello, Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse, Aswad and Misty in Roots, brought us together at concerts and allowed us to show how much we appreciated each other, despite ethnic and cultural differences.
But it wasn't only about dancing together in the parks, universities and polys. There was a common enemy, growing ever more powerful, to be routed. The National Front was strongly opposed by the Anti-Nazi League, of which I was a proud, badge-wearing member.
The idea was to stop the NF from intimidating local ethnic communities by marching through them. The Anti-Nazi League showed the NF that it would be opposed at every step and ANL demonstrations were serious affairs. The police took their duty to protect the right of the NF to march through ethnic communities very seriously.
April 23rd was the 19th anniversary of the death of Blair Peach, coshed to death by a policeman on an ANL demonstration. Once, not that far away physically or spiritually from Cable Street, we tried to stop the NF from marching through Brick Lane and intimidating the Bangladeshi community. The police responded with force.
I saw them drag a friend away by his hair when he sat down to protest. And as the NF approached, the well-behaved crowd was quickly forced onto the pavements and pushed back against the plate glass shop-fronts by a double cordon of police. I will always remember how the large policeman in front of me suddenly punched a 17-year-old punk girl standing next to me, forcefully in her breast. Young people were making a stand against racism and for the rights of immigrants.
But what we were not doing as teenagers on those Rock against Racism marches and concerts and on the ANL demonstrations was fighting inflation. I wonder if Gordon Brown could honestly say the same thing about his immigration policy.

How about a lesson in democracy?

Here's a really good lesson, one I am sure you will all want your children to learn. If you don't like having to eat salad or you don't feel like discussing frogspawn in biology, if you hate swimming or think it is unfair to have Double Maths on a Monday morning, then go on strike.
It's easy. Just sit on your desk and refuse to move, or don't come in at all - go shopping or play football instead. If the teachers complain, you can explain that it is the only way you can get your point across, that nothing ever happens through negotiation, and confrontation is the best way forward.
If the head teacher tells you that these are the rules and that the majority of pupils abide by them, stick two fingers up. Why shouldn't you disrupt everyone else's lives? If you don't look after yourself, no one else will. The more attention you draw to yourself, the better. Get the camera crews in, parade up and down the high street. It doesn't matter if most of the other pupils want to negotiate a deal to have chips instead of salad one day a week, or change Double Maths to a Tuesday. That would be a pathetic compromise.
That's the problem with the teachers going on strike. It was like watching Mr Smith having a cigarette behind the bike shed or Miss Roberts wearing a tight miniskirt and swigging alcopops between classes.
One of the most crucial jobs of a teacher is to be a role model. And what did recently was blackmail, not something you want your children to learn about at school. They were acting like toddlers, if you don't give us three more chocolate raisins, we are going to scream in the supermarket aisle. We can sense that you already feel harassed and that you are at the end of your tether, so maybe it will work. Or, from the teachers' point of view, they will get that four per cent pay deal, Gordon Brown, because you are tired and off balance and your week has been one long string of disasters.
Well, teachers shouldn't get any more money. They shouldn't be allowed to threaten people like this. Don’t misunderstand me here, I firmly believe in the worker’s right to remove their labour in protest.
Yet only one out of four of the teaching unions called this strike, only a quarter of the National Union of Teachers' members voted to take action, and fewer than one in 10 teachers has come out in favour of bunking off. But 5,000 schools were closed and 4,500 had their classes disrupted. Tens of thousands of children were affected, many of whom are gearing up for their exams.
Even greater numbers of parents had to make contingency plans, most of whom aren't going to get a pay increase of four per cent this year, many of whom may actually be concerned about keeping their jobs, all of whom are facing soaring food and fuel costs, but aren't holding their bosses to ransom.
In the last decade, teachers have received a 19 per cent real increase in pay. That's not as much as GPs, but more than midwives, nurses or the police. Head teachers have seen their pay rise by 26 per cent; thousands more teachers have been recruited since 1997, often encouraged by generous signing-on bonuses; and there are now 150,000 more support staff.
This year's pay increase was agreed by an independent review body. Unlike with the police, the Government hasn't gone back on any agreement - it has honoured its commitment, giving teachers a rise of 2.45 per cent this year. The teaching profession also receives generous final salary pension settlements that cost the taxpayer £10 billion a year, and has longer holidays than anyone except MPs.
In return, however, it has not delivered the results. More than a million teenagers have failed to gain the lowest grade in five GCSEs since Labour came to power.
So they should stop whinging - about pay, at least. In fact, teachers do have cause to be unhappy, but it's not about their salaries. Nor is it about any of the issues that the NUT seems to be obsessed with, such as army recruitment in schools or too much homework. What teachers should be complaining about is everything else that they have been handed along with their pay slips.
Teachers are expected to do a lot, from teaching children to eat their brussel sprouts, to preparing them for dozens of tests, to protecting them from other pupils wielding weapons. They must now fill out online reports, act as surrogate parents, shrinks and friends, prevent teenagers becoming pregnant; and keep discipline in classes filled with up to 60 children.
Disruptive pupils can't be admonished nor can they be threatened with expulsion. Children with learning difficulties must be taught beside gifted children. Pupils must still be taught sport with fewer playing fields. Five education secretaries in 10 years have piled on the regulations, to the point where children now need cookery as well as citizenship lessons. And parents aren't any less demanding. They expect teachers to be indulgent to their darlings while at the same time demanding that they come top of the class.
The answer for teachers is to give children a lesson in democracy rather than delinquency. The unions should make a list of teachers' real concerns and then draw up a manifesto for change, argue their case to politicians, parents and voters, and show how they want to improve education rather than their bank balances.
Then they will deserve a sympathetic hearing.

Slaves to the machines

If modern technology has been created to enhance our daily lives, something has dramatically shifted. More and more, our daily lives are enslaved to the electronic world.
This can sometimes be very troubling. On March 30th, 2008, a group of teenagers in Florida lured one of their own peers to one of the girl's homes and videotaped her beating. With one girl behind the camera to record the episode, and two boys guarding the door, the rest mercilessly beat the young woman into a pulp. It was for a dual purpose: to "punish" the victim for allegedly "trash talking" about them on MySpace, and to post the footage on YouTube. The most telling line during the beating was when the young woman behind the camera yelled out, "There's only 17 seconds left. Make it good."
Seventeen seconds left, that is, in a 10-minute slot, the maximum time one can post a video segment on YouTube. Well, Warhol was only off by five minutes.
Otherwise, Andy Warhol was frighteningly prophetic. A future in which everyone can be famous for about 10 minutes has indeed arrived. We have all become actors. We begin to believe that we are not fully ourselves, that we are not viable in the new system, unless we make some sort of electronic imprint, some sort of projection of ourselves, in the virtual world. Diaries, once locked away and hidden, have now gone electronic in the form of blogs and vlogs.
What makes the incident in Florida unusual, however, is not the violent acts but that the girls' actions were dictated not by a pure act of revenge but by a kind of exhibitionism rarely seen before. Stranger still is that increasingly the electronic world dictates exactly how an action should be carried out. The gang beating of the young woman, for instance, increased as the 10-minute segment neared its end. Did their beating lose steam, I wonder, when the camera stopped rolling?
Like actors who are trained to lose their reservations on stage, many now take daring risks for the virtual world, never mind that they might have repercussions in the real one. They show all, or do something enormously bizarre or violent to garner lots of hits, lots of eyeballs. I broadcast, therefore I am.

Drop out, Obama

Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion. It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.
If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out.
Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012. Here’s how it goes.
Obama drops out, stating that although he could almost certainly win the nomination by fighting it out until the convention in August, he is simply not willing to drag the party through a battle that will cripple its chances against John McCain. He then pledges to help support Senator Clinton in her bid, with full knowledge that she will not take him up on the offer.
In one stroke, Obama will regain his messiah cred by making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the party. And he will be the shoe-in Democrat Presidential candidate next time around.