A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Sunday 30 November 2014
New Poem: Frown
I was waiting for the dentist and the receptionist said,
‘Why the frown?’ I said I didn’t really know and it was
something I started doing when I was about ten. People
noticed it even then. Maybe I thought it looked serious
and I wanted to be as serious as my brother or my father.
Don’t we often want to be more than we are? I said, the
plus side being that it helps us carry on, but the down side
being that we are always unsatisfied, but then, that doesn’t
spring up as if by magic from inside, our desire is manufactured,
teams of people sit in towers of steel and glass figuring out
how they can get us to want stuff and even if we can’t afford it,
we still yearn for it, and isn’t it this the reason why we stick
with the system, eh, we’d rather have what we can’t have, than
change the fact that we can’t have it? She said she was
just wondering if I was bothered about the time of the next
appointment.
New Poem: Dogs
My friend said, ‘Don’t buy a dog from a pet shop.’
I said, ‘OK.’
He said, ‘Good one.’
I said, ‘Actually I wasn’t thinking of buying a dog.’
A few days later I thought I wasn’t thinking of buying
a dog but if I was thinking of buying a dog, where
would I go if I was?’
My friend had gone to see his relatives in Germany
but I was in the queue at the post office when I
heard a conversation behind me. It was two women.
One of them had a dog.
‘I got him at a refuge.’
‘Is he clean?’
‘Not really.’
I found the address of a dog refuge. It was in the
woods off the motorway. The dogs were in cages.
As I walked past, they came up to the fence and
looked at me. One of them seemed to be laughing
at me. I stopped at another one and looked very
closely at it. Some kind of mongrel. A bit sheepdog.
A bit labrador. It said, ‘There’s not much point in
getting me. I won’t come.’
‘Do you get a choice in the matter?’ I said.
‘Try me,’ it said.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’m really not into forcing anyone to
do anything. I’m not even sure I want a dog.’
‘Really? It’s not our job to help you work out your
hang-ups about dogs, you know,’ it said.
‘Yes. No. That’s right. I wasn’t working out anything.’
It went on looking at me very closely.
‘Are you that poet who does the Waitrose adverts?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not me.’
‘Out of interest,’ I said, ‘why wouldn’t you come with
me, if I really wanted you to be my dog?’
‘You said it just there,’ it said, ’in here I’m part of
something bigger than me. All you can talk about
is “me and my dog”...”my dog and me”...”what I want,
what I don’t want”.’
‘I could make it bigger than that. When I walk through
the park in the morning, there’s a meet-up place where
dog people all get together with their dogs.’
‘Same old crap,’ it said, ‘“we only meet because the
people want to meet”.’
‘Not good?’ I said.
‘In here, we have a strong sense of being in something
together.’
‘You are. You’re in here together,’ I said.
I had a feeling that that wasn’t the right thing to say. The
dog turned round and walked off to the back of the cage.
New Poem: Doughnut
I was having something to eat with a friend of mine.
He took a doughnut out of his bag and started to
eat it. I wanted to know how many people in the world
were biting a doughnut. They would have to be real
doughnuts not doughnut-like things, like you get in
France and Germany. I thought two and a half
million. My friend said maybe ten million, bearing in
mind it was daytime in the USA. I used to like
doughnuts. I haven’t eaten one for twenty years.
My friend ate his doughnut, scrumpled up the paper
bag and asked me if I had a tissue to wipe his mouth.
I said, ‘I always have a tissue somewhere on me but I
haven’t used a tissue for wiping my mouth after eating
a doughnut for more than twenty years.’
He said, ‘Really?’
New Poem: Noise
We were indoors when we heard a noise. My flatmate
said, ‘Can you hear that?’
I said, ‘What?’
He said, ‘Listen.’
I said, ‘I am listening.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘shuttup and then you’ll hear it.’
I stood absolutely still.
‘I can hear you breathing,’ I said.
‘No, not that, ‘he said, ‘that.’
‘That’s the point,’ I said, ‘everytime you say, ‘that’ I
don’t know the ‘that’ you mean.’
‘There,’ he said.
‘Just because you change the ‘that’ to ‘there’ doesn’t
make it any easier.’’
‘That,’ he said.
‘Ah, you’ve switched back.’ I said.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘Aeroplane,’ I said.
‘That’s not an aeroplane,’ he said.
An aeroplane passed overhead.
‘That’s an aeroplane,’ I said.
‘I know that’s an aeroplane,’ he said, ‘I meant the noise.’
‘The aeroplane is making a noise,’ I said.
‘I don’t mean the aeroplane noise,’ he said.
I listened really hard.
‘Do you think it’s an animal?’ I said.
‘I think it’s industrial,’ he said.
‘There’s no industry left round here,’ I said.
‘It’s something with an industrial sound,’ he said.
‘Animals can make industrial sounds,’ I said, ‘the cats
make a kind of dvvvvvv sound sometimes when they’re
sleeping.’
‘There!’ he said.
‘That’s someone’s fridge,’ I said.
‘No one’s fridge is that loud,’ he said.
‘Wrong,’ I said, ‘people are buying ancient fridges these days,
Some of them make that noise.’
‘How ancient?’
‘I don’t know, fridges from the 1950s. I’ve seen them,’ I said.
‘It’s a drill,’ he said.
‘Or a sander,’ I said.
‘Who would be sanding at this time?’
‘Or a cement mixer.’
‘Yes, it does sound like a cement mixer,’ he said.
‘No I meant, ‘who would be using a cement mixer at this
time?’’ I said.
‘But it does really sound like a cement mixer,’ he said.
‘There goes another aeroplane,’ I said.
New Poem: Jacket
The guy next to me on the bus did his jacket up
and said to me, ‘When I was a kid, we didn’t have
velcro.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘same for me. No velcro.’
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘we got along fine with
zips and buttons.’
‘Yep,’ I said.
‘Mind you, not many people know that zips had
to be invented,’ he said.
‘If you asked them, ‘Were zips
invented?’, I think most people would say that they
were,’ I said.
‘What about buttons?’
‘I like buttons,’ I said, ‘my mum had a button box.’
‘Do you think most people would know that buttons
were invented?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
He said, ‘I’m not so sure. People take buttons for
granted, these days.’
‘The zip on my jacket isn’t working,’ I said.
He said, ‘The thing about velcro is the amount of
time it saves.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘You bloody bet it does,’ he said, ‘every time I
velcro up this jacket, I save about three or four
seconds. Imagine what that is across a lifetime.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be a lifetime for you, though,’ I
said, ‘because velcro only came in later, didn’t
it?’
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘but think about it from the
kids’ point of view. They’re saving hours and hours
already. It’s why I feel so good about the future,’ he
said. ‘These kids are going to do so much more
than people of my generation.’
‘I think that’s what my grandparents thought when
the zip came in.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘My grandmother lived for about ten years in
America,’ I said, ‘and she really liked zips.’
‘Listen,’ he said and pulled the jacket open very
quickly, ‘every time I do that, I think, it was only
a few years ago, you would never have heard
that. I can’t imagine a world without the sound of
velcro.’
‘That’s not what Paul Simon sang was it?’ I said.
‘Sang what?’ he said.
‘No, nothing, ‘The Sound of Silence’, you know.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No I don’t know about that.’
New poem: Falafel
I was thinking about the indeterminacy of being,
and the uncertainty principle. I was wondering
how many times approximation falls short of the
precise point and where or how this intersects
with the universal tendency towards entropy. I
saw people in the street around me burdened
with a sense of inexactitude, people who displace
disappointment on to postponement and alongside
the road was a light box with the flashing sign
‘Delays possible’. I went into a cafe and bought
a falafel wrap, without the chili sauce.
New Poem: Dress
I was watching a channel that I didn’t know existed
and a man was explaining that they had been doing
visual research on street clothes and they had picked
up on the meme of the ragged dress. The ragged
dress, he said, spoke as much of absence as presence
and that modernity asks us to represent the binary.
There were some stills of people sleeping rough and
some moving footage of refugees resting. The man
pointed at the clothes and said that there were gaps,
‘aporia’ through which we see the body. The body he
explained is never ‘innocent’ but is always constructed
in time and space and whether we inflict damage on it,
or enclose it, or restrict its movements or eroticize it,
these are choices. The man then opened another file
and showed the designs he had made for “The Ragged
Dress”. I was watching a channel that I didn't know
existed.
Saturday 29 November 2014
New poem: Melon
I bought a memory stick and put some files on it.
When I opened it up, I saw that it had hundreds of thousands
of files on it. I started opening up some of these and I saw that
it wasn’t just files that I had made on there. It was my memories.
I opened a file called ‘Melon’ and it said that I had eaten a melon
near the Colosseum in Rome and that I swallowed the pips. I
don’t think that can be right. I don’t think I would have swallowed
the pips. I know why I wouldn’t have swallowed the pips: it’s
because my mother always said that she got appendicitis as a
result of swallowing melon pips. I looked that up on the memory
stick to see if it had that bit of memory. It was there. I’m not
sure where this leaves me. Should I go with the memory I have
of not eating melon pips? Or should I trust that the memory
stick has got it right? I mean, I can remember the melon
outside the Colosseum in Rome. It was summer and too hot
for me. There was a guy selling melons. I remember eating the
melon. I don’t remember how I got into the melon. Did he open
it up and whip the pips out? Or did he just hand it to me and
I opened it up with that knife I always took around with me?
And I know how to do that thing where you whips the seeds out,
cut the melon into segments, run the knife between the skin and
the flesh, then cut the crescents of melon into sections, then
stick the point of the knife into one section at at time, so that
you can eat the melon, chunk by chunk. But no seeds. That’s
the point. No one wants to eat the seeds. My mother used to
collect them, wash them and make necklaces out of them.
That one’s on the memory stick. I guess it got muddled between
the necklace and some baloney about me eating the seeds,
Wednesday 26 November 2014
New poem: Sign
I saw a sign ‘Not an exit’. It was on a door.
I thought that that would be a very useful
sign to have. I would put it on our fireplace
so that the cats would know not to go up
the chimney. I would put it on the fridge to
stop my children trying to leave home that
way. I would put it on the toilet bowl to stop
the goldfish from trying to find freedom through
there. I would put it on my copy of ‘Powerful
People’s Book of Great Excuses’ so that they
would know that they don’t work. I would put
it on a gravestone to say, you’re carrying on
in a different sort of a way.
The Languages of Migration - talk for the Migration Museum, given at the LSE Nov 26
Good evening.
Before I start, can we do a quick survey of our lived experiences and close acquaintance with migration? I’m doing this so that we can bring the quick survey with us through the talk. Far too often, the conversation about migration takes place as if people who have experience of migration are somewhere else, outside over there .
So this mini-questionnaire I’m about to do, is the tip of an iceberg, the bottom part of the iceberg being what we might call ‘our cultures of migration’...cultures that often lie obscured by the dominant rhetoric about migration.
How many people in the room have moved from another country or countries to live and/or work in the UK- short- medium or longterm ? [not me]
how many people in the room have at least one parent born in a country other than the UK? [me]
how many people have at least one grandparent born in a country other than the UK? [me]
how many people in the room have lived in a country other than the UK for more than a year? [not me] for more than 5 years? [not me] for more than 10 years? [not me]
Now spouses or partners:
how many people have a spouse or partner who comes originally from a non-UK country? [not me]how many people who have a spouse or partner who has at least one grandparent who comes from a non-UK country. [not me]
Now, one to include all forms of migration - migration of any kind, some of which isn’t called migration - it’s called ‘moving’ (or ‘being moved’):
how many people in the room are not living in the same house or flat they lived in as a child? [me]
I’ll come back to this matter of the ‘culture of migration’ in thinking about my own background later but let’s start in the eye of the storm, the conversations about migration that are going on at this very moment in the world of politics and the media. And in this part of the talk I want to be specific about the language around ‘migrants’, the language that colours the meaning of the words ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, ‘immigration’.
Here’s Barack Obama on Nov 20 2014
“Over the past few years, I have seen the determination of immigrant fathers who worked two or three jobs without taking a dime from the government, and at risk any moment of losing it all, just to build a better life for their kids. I’ve seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn’t have the right papers. I’ve seen the courage of students who, except for the circumstances of their birth, are as American as Malia or Sasha; students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in the country they love.
These people –- our neighbors, our classmates, our friends –- they did not come here in search of a free ride or an easy life. They came to work, and study, and serve in our military, and above all, contribute to America’s success.
Tomorrow, I’ll travel to Las Vegas and meet with some of these students, including a young woman named Astrid Silva. Astrid was brought to America when she was four years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn’t speak any English. She caught up to other kids by reading newspapers and watching PBS, and she became a good student. Her father worked in landscaping. Her mom cleaned other people’s homes. They wouldn’t let Astrid apply to a technology magnet school, not because they didn’t love her, but because they were afraid the paperwork would out her as an undocumented immigrant –- so she applied behind their back and got in. Still, she mostly lived in the shadows –- until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn’t travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her, and today, Astrid Silva is a college student working on her third degree.
Are we a nation that kicks out a striving, hopeful immigrant like Astrid, or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in? Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger –- we were strangers once, too.
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal -– that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
That’s the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That’s the tradition we must uphold. That’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.”
Here’s Tory MP Bernard Jenkin on November 24 BBC Radio 4 Today programme
He cited Alan Milburn who spoke of Britain becoming a ‘bifurcated nation’. Then he said:
‘One of the things that’s keeping low pay depressed is the endless supply of cheap labour coming in from the EU 8, the eastern European countries, the recent entrants to the European Union.’...
‘This is causing real problems in hospitals, in schools, the provision of public services, shortage of housing.. We need to address this in the public interest.’By the way, on the programme earlier in the interview, Bernard Jenkin showed his great familiarity with poor people by doubting if the BBC employed people on low pay. Perhaps he doesn’t know of the thousands of people working for the BBC as runners, researchers, cleaners, trainees, cafe staff and so on, may of whom are not only his special interest group, he seems to be saying - people on low pay - but are also migrants or children or grandchildren of migrants...But then why would he know that?
And here’s Nigel Farage, who as we’ll hear, has a very intimate acquaintance with migrants.
This is from the Daily Telegraph 16 May 2014 as written by Matthew Holehouse, the paper’s Political Correspondent. “Mr Farage was asked to justify claims made earlier this year that he feels “uncomfortable” and “awkward” on trains where nobody speaks English and parts of Britain are now “a foreign land”.
He said in February: "I got on the train the other night, it was rush hour, from Charing Cross.
"It was a stopper going out and we stopped at London Bridge, New Cross, Hither Green, it was not til we got past Grove Park that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes it does."
Mr Farage’s wife, Kirsten, is German, and his children are bilingual. Mr Farage said she speaks English outside the home.
“You felt uncomfortable about people speaking foreign languages, despite the fact presumably your own wife does when she phones home to Germany,” said James O’Brien, the host of LBC Radio.
Mr Farage replied: “I don’t suppose she speaks it on the train, you know. That’s the point I’m making.”
Mr Farage stood by his view, given in a recent interview, that he would be “concerned” if he had Romanian neighbours.
“I was asked a question if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? If you lived in London I think you would be," he said. He said the crime statistics relating to Romanian immigrants are “eye-watering”.
Asked why that would be different to German children moving in next door, he replied: “You know what the difference is.”
He added: "We want an immigration policy that is not just based on controlling not just quantity but quality".
“I’m not demonising anybody. I’m demonising a political class who has had an open door allowing things like this to happen.”
Mr O'Brien claimed there is an "avalanche of bigotry emerging" from Ukip and it represents "deeply divisive and racist ideas." He accused Mr Farage of conflating the trend of primary school children who speak English as a second language with those who cannot speak English at all. Mr Farage said the trend shows the need for tighter immigration controls.
But the former category would include Mr Farage's own children, Mr O'Brien said. "The point you are making is that children in the East End are full of children who can't speak English. I want you to recognise that's not true," he said. "Most bilingual children in this country are children like yours."
So from Barack Obama to Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Farage - all using language about migration - but in very different terms.
Obama has chosen to highlight the migrant and invested that word with ideas of struggle, incredibly hard work, sacrifice and bravery. He then went on to picture the reception of the migrant in America as traditional, righteous and historically normal - he posited the idea that everyone is a migrant. He also made a point of drawing on a notion of equality - enshrined in the founding principles of the United States. What was also crucial here was that he was suggesting that these ideas and principles were bigger and more important than illegality - or at the very least - the government could and should overcome the matter of illegality. So, though illegality is often attached to the word ‘migrant’, Obama suggests that the government could side with the migrant to overcome the illegality or in language terms - detach illegality from the word ‘migrant’.
Needless to say, there are people who are appalled by what Obama has said here and many will take it to ‘prove’ - prove in quotes - that he is, as they have always said, a foreigner and a communist Muslim; or is that a Muslim communist?
From a radical perspective, it’s possible to raise an eyebrow at one aspect of the speech. The US is indeed a nation of migrants including the first nation peoples who migrated into what we call North America any time from about 40,000 years ago. It’s a pity they didn’t get a mention.
There’s also the question of whether America is as different from other countries as Obama suggests. Is there a country in the world that is not a nation of immigrants? Is there any nation in the world that is made up of only the descendants of people who lived in that precise land mass for, what shall we say, 40,000 years? I suspect that Obama was drawing on folk memory and American people’s knowledge of family history when he says ‘nation of immigrants’ , rather than making an observation about the history of all human beings everywhere. I’ll make that observation instead: we are a world of migrants.
Now for Bernard Jenkin.
Jenkin draws on what some might regard as a radical image, a ‘bifurcated nation’ meaning the split between rich and poor. Humane though that this might seem to be, migrants in his language are not people. He doesn’t even use the word ‘migrant’. We don’t hear a Jenkin equivalent of Obama’s Astrid Silva or the father with three jobs or the woman cleaning in people’s homes or the children who are anxious that their mother might be deported. In Bernard Jenkin’s language, migrants are ‘an endless supply of cheap labour’.
What can we say about this? Well, first off, whatever it is, it’s not ‘endless’. There are finite numbers involved. It’s not a ‘supply’ because no one is supplying them. And the phrase ‘cheap labour’ is a handy way of dehumanizing people by reducing them to the price of their labour - that is to say a cost. But labour is a cost purely and only from the point of view of an employer. Working people don’t look at their pay slips and say, ‘Ah here’s my cost’. Now let’s remind ourselves of what, according to Jenkin, these costs, these massed economic units do: they ‘keep low pay depressed’.
Now I don’t know exactly what goes on in board rooms. I’ve only ever seen them in documentaries or mocked up in film and TV. But someone tell me, what are those people doing in there if they’re not doing all they can to ‘keep low pay depressed’? I thought that this was what shareholders want them to do. In their terms, isn’t this keeping the cost of labour down? How, in the Jenkin universe, is the dehumanized mass of labour that Jenkin shakes in front of us, able to do that? Aren’t they living people who turn up and apply for a job? Throughout most of my childhood and adolescence I heard employers telling a terrible story: they were being brought to their knees by vicious people called trade unionists who did all they could to stop low pay being depressed. Then, the story goes, the heavens opened and we finally got a prime minister who put a stop to all that.
I raise this, in order to clarify why it is that Bernard Jenkin of all people would object to ‘low pay’ being ‘depressed’? After all, it’s his party which says that the way to having (I quote) a ‘resilient economy’ is through the wise and necessary implementation of a low wage policy. So what can his objection be? Or has he just found a bit of populist language for the Today programme to attach to the idea he has of migrants?
Then he says that migration is causing problems for the public services. So, here, the migrant is now attached to an image: the image of overcrowded schools, packed hospital waiting rooms, and tiny huddles of hard-pressed social workers. Now, you and I may have noticed that these particular images have in the last four years been attached to something else altogether - the ‘resilient economy’... which, we are told, can only be achieved through Bernard Jenkin’s government wisely and sagely cutting back on schools, hospitals and social services.
As Dennis Skinner put in the House of Commons when the new UKIP MP, Mark Reckless took his seat this week: ‘I have a united nations heart.’ Our public services - apparently having problems from migrants according to Jenkin - also happen to be/ and have been staffed by hundreds of thousands of migrants since the 1950s. So what is it? Staffed or besieged? And if it’s besieged, how does cutting the services help?
I suspect that his has much more to do with populism than logic: the idea of the ‘migrant’ is attached to blame as Jenkin makes them solely responsible for the effects of the cuts his government implements, and he somehow manages not to attach the word to praise, as Dennis Skinner did, for the decades of hard work running the public services which he claims to want to defend on our behalf.
Now to Farage -
first there is problem for him: he claims he couldn’t hear English being spoken between London Bridge and Grove Park. I travel all over the London transport systems and the only time I’ve been in a carriage where there is no English being spoken at all is when a couple of classes of French or German school children fill it up. But that’s not what he means, is it? He wants to invoke something that he hopes will appear more sinister.
I very much doubt that he’s telling the truth. After all, a great proportion of migrants speak English because English people migrated to their countries. You’ll know the old gag about the migrant from one of the countries of the British Empire who is asked why his family live in England and he says, ‘We’re here, because you were there.’ Gags like that, it should be said are part of an alternative and resistant language of migration.
So, I suspect that Farage is dabbling in something rather nasty here. He wants to conjure up a picture of a public service taken over and blocked up by foreigners. The reason why you or I are crammed into the train at rush hour, he is saying, is because it’s full of migrants. Crowded trains, he suggests, are nothing to do with the resources spent on transport in this country, but entirely down to people who have come to the UK to work - sometimes driving the very train that Farage is sitting on while he curses migrants.
Even so, let’s imagine for a moment that Farage is right: there’s a carriage full of people not speaking English. What precisely is the objection here? Should there be a rule about speaking English in public spaces? Should Farage’s awkwardness-count be respected in law? Has he never been on the Costa Brava or in a cafe in south-west France where you can hear a lot of English being spoken? In his blokey way is he going to point out how ‘awkward’ that must be for the Spanish and French natives? Or is awkwardness a one-way street?
In fact it rather seems as if the only awkward thing going on for Farage is that he keeps going on about this stuff about foreigners, even as he lives with a migrant, a migrant who we discover does that suspect thing of speaking another language. And as the interviewer points out, this person almost certainly speaks to her relatives on the phone in that language whilst living in England. But, more importantly, as we gather, unlike the train babble, Mrs Farage does some kind of OK-foreign-language-talking. So we’ve got a new duality here: bad-language-migrant, good-language-migrant. Let’s not look for logic here. This is more populist flame-throwing.
Farage’s next bit of language is doing something classic: it’s the politician’s rhetoric of recruitment. This can be done by using the word ‘you’ when at very best the politician means ‘I’. So, apparently if Romanians moved in, ‘you’ would be concerned. This is because, says Farage, Romanians commit crimes. Here the word migrant is attached to criminality - one of the main props for selling newspapers for as long as anyone has been identified as a migrant. To sell this one, a politician has to be sure to avoid comparing like with like. Comparing crime figures by nationality doesn’t compare like with like. Nationalities come to a country with very different amounts of money in their pockets and cv’s in their bags. In this particular case, if we want to find out if there is or is not anything surprising or distinctive going on, a comparison might be fairer between, say, different groups of poor, young single males. Even so, criminality is not an objective measure. It’s a measure as done by the police. Since the Stephenson report, it is now public knowledge that how and why the police make arrests is not an unbiased matter.
But Farage’s purpose is to avoid nuance: keep it short - attach the word migrant to criminality.
And then he performs another old dodge of the anti-migrant - the verbal nudge-nudge. When asked why a Romanian moving in next door would be different from someone like Mrs Farage moving in, he says, ‘You know what I mean’.
This nudge-nudge phrasing is ideal if you don’t want to be accused of being racist. While saying everything, it appears to say nothing. It makes the listener responsible for the racism. The bad migrant, the invading neighbour is here attached to whatever bad thoughts might be swirling around in your mind. Given that newspapers have worked overtime for well over a hundred years suggesting that migrants have a particular interest (on account of being migrant) in committing unspeakable crimes, we might ask why wouldn’t I do as Farage suggests and nudge-nudge ‘know what he means’? In fact, some of us don’t. We resist the nudge.
And then back with the foreign language question, it’s clear that Farage would rather make the linguistic complexity of the migration very simple: foreigners speak foreign. And yet he must be intimately acquainted with how nuanced these things can be, how his wife has come, we might suspect, to be very fluent in English, how their children are growing up bilingual, how he too perhaps has some grasp of his partner’s language. How, as a family, they mingle words and expressions across at least two languages. And if he wanted to be honest, he could find out in a matter of minutes that this is precisely the situation that prevails in most migrant households...a mixture of language-use across two or more languages. Far from this being strange or problematical, this is what happens in billions of households all over the world. What is strange and problematical is that Farage appears to think that it’s strange or problematical. ‘Appears to’. Surely it isn’t problematical down at the Farages. So why is he saying that it is for others? Because the script of anti-migration-speak says to Farage, ‘Go on about foreigners talking foreign. Attach migrants to the idea that they get together in huddles precisely in order to stop you understanding what they’re saying. Suggest - without saying, that as migrants are attached to criminality, then you good English folks within earshot are entitled to think that the reason why foreigners talk foreign on our trains is so that they can plan to burgle your house, without you English people knowing about it. After all, before there were migrants, no one went burglaring. ‘
There was, Farage implies, a time when there was a pre-migrant London and this never-existing pre-migrant London was a burglar-free zone.
So, by comparing Obama’s rhetoric with that of Jenkin’s and Farage’s we can see that politicians have options on how to speak about migrants.
But so far, this talk has hardly touched on another matter in the language of migration, the voice of the migrants.
Let me get personal and as I do so, I hope you’ll compare your family and historical experiences of migration.
My father was born in the United States. He came to London when he was two. His father, who was born in Poland, stayed in the US along with two of my father’s brothers who had been born in London. My father’s mother was born in England. Her mother and father were born in Poland. I don’t expect you to remember any of that. Indeed in many migrant families, even family members find it hard to remember this sort of thing. It’s the stuff of a hundred stories, coincidences, losses, and strange meetings.
Poland for many Jewish emigrants was known in Yiddish, as ‘der Heim’ which literally means ‘home’ but it came to mean ‘the homeland’ or something more vague like ‘back there’. Again the culture of migration, creates popular shorthand phraseology that doesn’t tally neatly with the concerns of politicians with their cricket supporting tests and nationality exams. In the case of the term ‘der Heim’ it’s transnational, Jews of many different nationalities all over the world called it that. The language of migration crosses many borders.
In this passage I’m about to read you’ll hear the Yiddish words for grandfather which is ‘zeyde’, grandmother - which is ‘bubbe’ and a crazy person which is ‘meshuggene’. Part of the language of migrants is that they often talk in many tongues like this. Here’s my father writing:
“We would stand by the edge of the grubby old public swimming pool drying ourselves, my zeider and I. As likely as not he would tell me once again about how he would go swimming back in der heim somewhere in Poland. I would listen to this fragment of his boyhood. Always I saw him in some Arcadian setting of endless pine trees and velvet grass sloping down to a still lake. It was always early morning. He would emerge from a log cabin, run to the water and fracture its stillness with strong strokes. He would go on swimming till he was lost to view. There were no other people, no other houses, no other movements. It was an idyll I clung to from which I had banished pogroms and poverty and the fearful little community huddled over their prayers and sewing machines. That was my story not his. And when we went on day trips to Southend, East London’s seaside, in his sixties he would set out to swim the length of the pier and back, a mile or so each way. My bubbe without fail went through the identical torments of anxiety. ‘The meshuggene! He’s gone out too far again.’ I was free from all such fears. For he was always the intrepid boy swimmer in the pure lake who always came back. And he did. And even in death still does.’
So, my father carried about an image of another place, a mythic place of origin, which he shared with me and my brother through language.
And there’s this:
“Zeyde’s jokes baffled me at first and I would have to put on a phony laugh at stories I wasn’t ready for. He once told me of the great sage Rabbi Nachman. I’ve heard it in dozens of versions since. The old rabbi was on his deathbed, and his devoted disciples gathered round and took their last chance to ask him the great question.
‘Rabbi Nachman, tell us what is life?’
They waited for a long time, fearful that they would not hear a reply. At long last the rabbi gasped out, ‘Life - is like a fish.’
Baffled, they hastily conferred and came back to his bedside.
‘Rabbi Nachman, why is life like a fish?’
The old man looked at them,
‘So - it’s not like a fish.’
Zeyde gave the rabbi’s reply the tone of impatient irritation. How was this a joke? The adults loved it. Relished it and would repeat, ‘So? It’s not like a fish’ and fall about. In due course I came to laugh too.”
What do stories like this tell us?
Lines of language, thought and culture that persist across countries and across time. No matter what Jenkin and Farage say, the word migrant in my mind is much more attached to these lines than to the lines they want to make.
And though there’s nothing wrong with sentiment and nostalgia, from my position of comfort, it’s easy to forget that some of these lines are stories of persecution, separation, hardship, humiliation or worse.
In my father’s writing, there are memories of relatives talking about Cossacks charging at people in Russia but also of standing between his mother and grandfather on a demonstration during the General Strike of 1926. A few months ago, my step-mother came to the house with a little plastic jar full of odds and ends that had belonged to my father, some dating back to the 1920s. In amongst them, was a small brass brooch in the shape of a miner’s lamp. I looked it up on the internet and discovered that such brooches were sold to support the miners’ families who were on strike or locked out after everyone else went back to work during and after the General Strike. I can’t be certain, but it probably belonged to his mother or grandfather.
When I hear that the word ‘migrant’ has to be tested for its owner’s allegiance to Britain, I think that that’s only one kind of allegiance. Isn’t there an allegiance to the people around us? I have to spell it out for myself - perhaps for you, or perhaps not. Here are these people standing behind me, with their memories of a real or mythic heim, telling mythic jokes about Rabbi Nachman and buying a brooch to send money to South Wales, or Yorkshire or Lanarkshire for families who, according to the migrant-versus-native-Briton scenario, lived lives utterly different from my relatives, or indeed, said the propaganda of the day, utterly opposed to each other. Whichever of the two main stereotypes attached to Jews of the time: ‘as rich as Baron Rothschild’ or as ‘poor, stingy, filthy, greasy and jabbering’ as in William Makepeace Thackeray’s poem ‘The White Squall’, neither of them would have included buying a brooch for hungry miners’ families.
As I am doing right now, I write about such things.
Because of that, I, like other writers, become magnets for other people’s tales.My second cousin wrote to me a few years ago to say that his mother’s second husband had left behind some papers. In the papers there were letters and cards that had been sent from Poland and France during the Second World War. They were in German.
Sender:
Exp.
Rosen, 11 rue Mellaise Niort (Deux Sévres) France
Addressee: Monsieur
Max Rosen
96, West Cedar St. Boston (Mass)
S.A.
Niort, March 23, 1940
My dears,
Only today did I receive your dear letter dated February 29. I hope that you already received my card dated March 18. We are glad to hear that you are in good health and I can tell you the same from us. We were very pleased to receive your letter and we thank you very much. I just learned from you that dear Bella is no more in Biala. I tried to make inquiries but unfortunately I can’t get any information. I am very surprised that you have not yet received any news from Poland. You live in a neutral country, therefore it is much easier for you to find out something about our sisters in Poland. Who knows whether they are still alive. I am giving you the following addresses. Write immediately. Also let me know right away whether you received this card. You may also write to me in Yiddish. Tea Weinstock in Opoczno, ziemia Radomska. --- Stella Rechnitz, ulica Zeromskiego No. 17 in Dombrowa-Górnicza, bei Sosnowiec Poland.
I learned that it is best to write in Polish to Poland, and up to 25 words, not more.
If you receive a letter from Poland, only send me a copy.
Nothing else new, as I am awaiting good news.
Best regards,
Your brother, brother-in-law
Oscar
My dear wife also sends you many regards and wishes you the best. Awaiting immediate answers, as it takes very long.
and
Hand-written registered postcard with German stamps, airmail stamp, and a German military censorship stamp
Sender:
Bernard Rechnitz Dombrowa 6/S Schlesischestr. 14
Addressee: Mr.
Max Rosen Boston-Mass West Cedar 96 U.S.A.
Dombrowa, January 22, 1941
Dear Brother,
I have written to you several times and urged you fervently to take in my only child. Michal/ Marolka / Rechnitz in Joszkar – 6 Ta, Maryjskoja U.S.S.R. pocstowy Jasscryk No. 8 barack / 7. Sowjet Union.
He went sent way from Lemberg and only America can rescue him. Therefore I am fervently asking you to take the necessary steps immediately. Many thousands have already gone to America. I am asking you again and fulfill my request. I have sent you my son’s birth certificate. Born November 16, 1923 in Dombrowa 6/S.
What are you doing my dears? Kisses to you and your dear wife.
Maybe for now you can send him a few dollars? I beg you very much.
Hand-written postcard with German stamps and airmail stamp
Sender:
Bernard Rechnitz Dombrowa 6/S Schlesischestr. 14
Addressee: Mr.
Max Rosen Boston-Mass West Cedar 96 U.S.A.
Dombrowa, February 11, 1941
Dear Brother,
I hope you have already taken the steps to take in my son. Maybe you could adopt him to make this work?
Dear brother, I urge you. For now send him a few dollars and packages with food because he has nothing. I fervently urge you to send something as soon as possible. Don’t be upset with me but only you ? [remainder of the sentence is obscured by airmail stamp]
Kisses to you and to you dear wife and children.
Your sister StellaThen there are no more letters.
So, to be clear here, the letters survived because they were passed from the recipient, Max Rosen, to his son Ted, who left them with his divorced wife. She left them with her second husband and when he died they were passed on to his step-son, my second cousin, Ted jnr. I asked Ted jnr why his father hadn’t kept them. ‘My theory’, he said, is ‘because they were all ashamed that none of the senders of the letters, (or people mentioned in the letters) Stella,Bernard, Bella and Tea in Poland and Oscar and his wife in France survived beyond 1944.’
In France, civil servants who act as intermediaries between central and local government, the prefects and sub-prefects made lists of foreign born Jews - migrants that is - and handed them to the occupying power. (An example of how the official language of migration can be used.) Oscar and his wife were rounded up in Nice and sent to Paris, to the transit camp of Drancy, then to Auschwitz. Michael did survive - migration saved his life - another connotation which can be attached to the word migrant, ‘life-saving’. He spent all his working life as a London cab driver and lives in Stanmore. When we sent him these letters, he said that he had always wondered who sent him 50 dollars while he was in a Russian prison camp in Siberia and now he knew. It must have come from his cousin Max. Fragments of language preserved in letters across decades, suddenly solving old mysteries.
A few years ago, I was sitting in a classroom in Hackney and we were talking about the different languages we spoke and the different countries that people came from.
A child spoke to the teacher and I wrote down what he said:
He doesn’t speak English, miss.
He comes from the Congo, miss.
I translate for you, miss.
He says thgat the bad men take his grandfather, miss.
He says that the bad men take his grandmother, miss.
He says that the bad men take his dad, miss.
He says that the bad men take his mum, miss.
He doesn’t say how he got here, miss.
He can’t say how he got here, miss.
I’ll finish with what we might take as the mother of all interviews about migrants.. it provided the key word ‘swamp’ which along with synonyms, not used by Margaret Thatcher on this occasion - like ‘flood’ and ‘swarm’ - has provided metaphors for a thousand articles and speeches since. It was January 1978 and Margaret Thatcher connected ‘swamped’ with the words ‘people are really rather afraid’ followed a moment later with ‘fear’ and people being ‘rather hostile to those coming in’.
I think this is all I remembered from the interview, but going back over it, I find that I’ve forgotten a great deal. It was also here that Margaret Thatcher invoked the superiority of the British: ‘British characteristics that have done so much for the world’, and the essential item in the anti-migrant’s tool box the contrast between the the word ‘migrant’ and the word ‘people’ as in ‘The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.’ For a flicker of a second we could be forgiven here for thinking that the minority aren’t people. Or that the normal and good thing to be is ‘people’ and the strange scary thing is to be is a ‘minority’.
Whether intentionally or not, this language structure has been repeated a thousand times since. In the sentence, the ‘people’ are not the ‘minority’. If you’re going to play with contrasts and opposite, the linguistic counterpart to a ‘minority’ is a ‘majority’ . It’s not ‘people’. So we are shown, without it being said explicitly, that the minority are not people. As I’ve suggested, this kind of sentence’s comrade in arms is any that finds ways of reducing or distorting migrants into objects, as with ‘the endless supply of cheap labour’. Bernard Jenkin, you’ll remember, counterposed that phrase with ‘the public interest’.
What both Thatcher and Jenkin do with their language is to deliberately not give us a picture of a majority-minority making up a whole population, a whole people. They use all-inclusive words like ‘people’ and ‘public interest’ at the very same moment they are suggesting that there is a particular kind of non-human creature who is not part of that inclusiveness. In logical terms it’s an absurdity: migrants are part of the ‘people’. Migrants are part of the ‘public interest’. Everywhere that is, apart from in these kinds of sentences.
The British political scene is changing. Mark Reckless implied and then ‘unimplied’ that he thinks it would be desirable or necessary to deport migrants. Having flagged this up as a possibility, his head office denied it. It’s OK, the deed was done. The word ‘migrant’ was attached to the idea of deportation. If I was someone who says there are too many migrants, then the logical next step from there is to say that some of them must be got rid of, removed. If I was then wondering who would be the most likely party to do the removing then , surely I would now know that it would be Mark Reckless’s party even if the party did deny it, eh, nudge nudge.
Because they’ve denied it, we can’t quiz them on how precisely would these deportations be handled: what do they have in mind? snatch squads? armed guards? armoured trains? transit camps?
But this is an inadmissible conversation. It lies in the land behind and beyond the language of migration. In some ways, because it’s not said, it’s the most powerful use of language of all.
It’s in some people’s heads.
Before I start, can we do a quick survey of our lived experiences and close acquaintance with migration? I’m doing this so that we can bring the quick survey with us through the talk. Far too often, the conversation about migration takes place as if people who have experience of migration are somewhere else, outside over there .
So this mini-questionnaire I’m about to do, is the tip of an iceberg, the bottom part of the iceberg being what we might call ‘our cultures of migration’...cultures that often lie obscured by the dominant rhetoric about migration.
How many people in the room have moved from another country or countries to live and/or work in the UK- short- medium or longterm ? [not me]
how many people in the room have at least one parent born in a country other than the UK? [me]
how many people have at least one grandparent born in a country other than the UK? [me]
how many people in the room have lived in a country other than the UK for more than a year? [not me] for more than 5 years? [not me] for more than 10 years? [not me]
Now spouses or partners:
how many people have a spouse or partner who comes originally from a non-UK country? [not me]how many people who have a spouse or partner who has at least one grandparent who comes from a non-UK country. [not me]
Now, one to include all forms of migration - migration of any kind, some of which isn’t called migration - it’s called ‘moving’ (or ‘being moved’):
how many people in the room are not living in the same house or flat they lived in as a child? [me]
I’ll come back to this matter of the ‘culture of migration’ in thinking about my own background later but let’s start in the eye of the storm, the conversations about migration that are going on at this very moment in the world of politics and the media. And in this part of the talk I want to be specific about the language around ‘migrants’, the language that colours the meaning of the words ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, ‘immigration’.
Here’s Barack Obama on Nov 20 2014
“Over the past few years, I have seen the determination of immigrant fathers who worked two or three jobs without taking a dime from the government, and at risk any moment of losing it all, just to build a better life for their kids. I’ve seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn’t have the right papers. I’ve seen the courage of students who, except for the circumstances of their birth, are as American as Malia or Sasha; students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in the country they love.
These people –- our neighbors, our classmates, our friends –- they did not come here in search of a free ride or an easy life. They came to work, and study, and serve in our military, and above all, contribute to America’s success.
Tomorrow, I’ll travel to Las Vegas and meet with some of these students, including a young woman named Astrid Silva. Astrid was brought to America when she was four years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn’t speak any English. She caught up to other kids by reading newspapers and watching PBS, and she became a good student. Her father worked in landscaping. Her mom cleaned other people’s homes. They wouldn’t let Astrid apply to a technology magnet school, not because they didn’t love her, but because they were afraid the paperwork would out her as an undocumented immigrant –- so she applied behind their back and got in. Still, she mostly lived in the shadows –- until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn’t travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her, and today, Astrid Silva is a college student working on her third degree.
Are we a nation that kicks out a striving, hopeful immigrant like Astrid, or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in? Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger –- we were strangers once, too.
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal -– that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
That’s the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That’s the tradition we must uphold. That’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.”
Here’s Tory MP Bernard Jenkin on November 24 BBC Radio 4 Today programme
He cited Alan Milburn who spoke of Britain becoming a ‘bifurcated nation’. Then he said:
‘One of the things that’s keeping low pay depressed is the endless supply of cheap labour coming in from the EU 8, the eastern European countries, the recent entrants to the European Union.’...
‘This is causing real problems in hospitals, in schools, the provision of public services, shortage of housing.. We need to address this in the public interest.’By the way, on the programme earlier in the interview, Bernard Jenkin showed his great familiarity with poor people by doubting if the BBC employed people on low pay. Perhaps he doesn’t know of the thousands of people working for the BBC as runners, researchers, cleaners, trainees, cafe staff and so on, may of whom are not only his special interest group, he seems to be saying - people on low pay - but are also migrants or children or grandchildren of migrants...But then why would he know that?
And here’s Nigel Farage, who as we’ll hear, has a very intimate acquaintance with migrants.
This is from the Daily Telegraph 16 May 2014 as written by Matthew Holehouse, the paper’s Political Correspondent. “Mr Farage was asked to justify claims made earlier this year that he feels “uncomfortable” and “awkward” on trains where nobody speaks English and parts of Britain are now “a foreign land”.
He said in February: "I got on the train the other night, it was rush hour, from Charing Cross.
"It was a stopper going out and we stopped at London Bridge, New Cross, Hither Green, it was not til we got past Grove Park that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes it does."
Mr Farage’s wife, Kirsten, is German, and his children are bilingual. Mr Farage said she speaks English outside the home.
“You felt uncomfortable about people speaking foreign languages, despite the fact presumably your own wife does when she phones home to Germany,” said James O’Brien, the host of LBC Radio.
Mr Farage replied: “I don’t suppose she speaks it on the train, you know. That’s the point I’m making.”
Mr Farage stood by his view, given in a recent interview, that he would be “concerned” if he had Romanian neighbours.
“I was asked a question if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? If you lived in London I think you would be," he said. He said the crime statistics relating to Romanian immigrants are “eye-watering”.
Asked why that would be different to German children moving in next door, he replied: “You know what the difference is.”
He added: "We want an immigration policy that is not just based on controlling not just quantity but quality".
“I’m not demonising anybody. I’m demonising a political class who has had an open door allowing things like this to happen.”
Mr O'Brien claimed there is an "avalanche of bigotry emerging" from Ukip and it represents "deeply divisive and racist ideas." He accused Mr Farage of conflating the trend of primary school children who speak English as a second language with those who cannot speak English at all. Mr Farage said the trend shows the need for tighter immigration controls.
But the former category would include Mr Farage's own children, Mr O'Brien said. "The point you are making is that children in the East End are full of children who can't speak English. I want you to recognise that's not true," he said. "Most bilingual children in this country are children like yours."
So from Barack Obama to Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Farage - all using language about migration - but in very different terms.
Obama has chosen to highlight the migrant and invested that word with ideas of struggle, incredibly hard work, sacrifice and bravery. He then went on to picture the reception of the migrant in America as traditional, righteous and historically normal - he posited the idea that everyone is a migrant. He also made a point of drawing on a notion of equality - enshrined in the founding principles of the United States. What was also crucial here was that he was suggesting that these ideas and principles were bigger and more important than illegality - or at the very least - the government could and should overcome the matter of illegality. So, though illegality is often attached to the word ‘migrant’, Obama suggests that the government could side with the migrant to overcome the illegality or in language terms - detach illegality from the word ‘migrant’.
Needless to say, there are people who are appalled by what Obama has said here and many will take it to ‘prove’ - prove in quotes - that he is, as they have always said, a foreigner and a communist Muslim; or is that a Muslim communist?
From a radical perspective, it’s possible to raise an eyebrow at one aspect of the speech. The US is indeed a nation of migrants including the first nation peoples who migrated into what we call North America any time from about 40,000 years ago. It’s a pity they didn’t get a mention.
There’s also the question of whether America is as different from other countries as Obama suggests. Is there a country in the world that is not a nation of immigrants? Is there any nation in the world that is made up of only the descendants of people who lived in that precise land mass for, what shall we say, 40,000 years? I suspect that Obama was drawing on folk memory and American people’s knowledge of family history when he says ‘nation of immigrants’ , rather than making an observation about the history of all human beings everywhere. I’ll make that observation instead: we are a world of migrants.
Now for Bernard Jenkin.
Jenkin draws on what some might regard as a radical image, a ‘bifurcated nation’ meaning the split between rich and poor. Humane though that this might seem to be, migrants in his language are not people. He doesn’t even use the word ‘migrant’. We don’t hear a Jenkin equivalent of Obama’s Astrid Silva or the father with three jobs or the woman cleaning in people’s homes or the children who are anxious that their mother might be deported. In Bernard Jenkin’s language, migrants are ‘an endless supply of cheap labour’.
What can we say about this? Well, first off, whatever it is, it’s not ‘endless’. There are finite numbers involved. It’s not a ‘supply’ because no one is supplying them. And the phrase ‘cheap labour’ is a handy way of dehumanizing people by reducing them to the price of their labour - that is to say a cost. But labour is a cost purely and only from the point of view of an employer. Working people don’t look at their pay slips and say, ‘Ah here’s my cost’. Now let’s remind ourselves of what, according to Jenkin, these costs, these massed economic units do: they ‘keep low pay depressed’.
Now I don’t know exactly what goes on in board rooms. I’ve only ever seen them in documentaries or mocked up in film and TV. But someone tell me, what are those people doing in there if they’re not doing all they can to ‘keep low pay depressed’? I thought that this was what shareholders want them to do. In their terms, isn’t this keeping the cost of labour down? How, in the Jenkin universe, is the dehumanized mass of labour that Jenkin shakes in front of us, able to do that? Aren’t they living people who turn up and apply for a job? Throughout most of my childhood and adolescence I heard employers telling a terrible story: they were being brought to their knees by vicious people called trade unionists who did all they could to stop low pay being depressed. Then, the story goes, the heavens opened and we finally got a prime minister who put a stop to all that.
I raise this, in order to clarify why it is that Bernard Jenkin of all people would object to ‘low pay’ being ‘depressed’? After all, it’s his party which says that the way to having (I quote) a ‘resilient economy’ is through the wise and necessary implementation of a low wage policy. So what can his objection be? Or has he just found a bit of populist language for the Today programme to attach to the idea he has of migrants?
Then he says that migration is causing problems for the public services. So, here, the migrant is now attached to an image: the image of overcrowded schools, packed hospital waiting rooms, and tiny huddles of hard-pressed social workers. Now, you and I may have noticed that these particular images have in the last four years been attached to something else altogether - the ‘resilient economy’... which, we are told, can only be achieved through Bernard Jenkin’s government wisely and sagely cutting back on schools, hospitals and social services.
As Dennis Skinner put in the House of Commons when the new UKIP MP, Mark Reckless took his seat this week: ‘I have a united nations heart.’ Our public services - apparently having problems from migrants according to Jenkin - also happen to be/ and have been staffed by hundreds of thousands of migrants since the 1950s. So what is it? Staffed or besieged? And if it’s besieged, how does cutting the services help?
I suspect that his has much more to do with populism than logic: the idea of the ‘migrant’ is attached to blame as Jenkin makes them solely responsible for the effects of the cuts his government implements, and he somehow manages not to attach the word to praise, as Dennis Skinner did, for the decades of hard work running the public services which he claims to want to defend on our behalf.
Now to Farage -
first there is problem for him: he claims he couldn’t hear English being spoken between London Bridge and Grove Park. I travel all over the London transport systems and the only time I’ve been in a carriage where there is no English being spoken at all is when a couple of classes of French or German school children fill it up. But that’s not what he means, is it? He wants to invoke something that he hopes will appear more sinister.
I very much doubt that he’s telling the truth. After all, a great proportion of migrants speak English because English people migrated to their countries. You’ll know the old gag about the migrant from one of the countries of the British Empire who is asked why his family live in England and he says, ‘We’re here, because you were there.’ Gags like that, it should be said are part of an alternative and resistant language of migration.
So, I suspect that Farage is dabbling in something rather nasty here. He wants to conjure up a picture of a public service taken over and blocked up by foreigners. The reason why you or I are crammed into the train at rush hour, he is saying, is because it’s full of migrants. Crowded trains, he suggests, are nothing to do with the resources spent on transport in this country, but entirely down to people who have come to the UK to work - sometimes driving the very train that Farage is sitting on while he curses migrants.
Even so, let’s imagine for a moment that Farage is right: there’s a carriage full of people not speaking English. What precisely is the objection here? Should there be a rule about speaking English in public spaces? Should Farage’s awkwardness-count be respected in law? Has he never been on the Costa Brava or in a cafe in south-west France where you can hear a lot of English being spoken? In his blokey way is he going to point out how ‘awkward’ that must be for the Spanish and French natives? Or is awkwardness a one-way street?
In fact it rather seems as if the only awkward thing going on for Farage is that he keeps going on about this stuff about foreigners, even as he lives with a migrant, a migrant who we discover does that suspect thing of speaking another language. And as the interviewer points out, this person almost certainly speaks to her relatives on the phone in that language whilst living in England. But, more importantly, as we gather, unlike the train babble, Mrs Farage does some kind of OK-foreign-language-talking. So we’ve got a new duality here: bad-language-migrant, good-language-migrant. Let’s not look for logic here. This is more populist flame-throwing.
Farage’s next bit of language is doing something classic: it’s the politician’s rhetoric of recruitment. This can be done by using the word ‘you’ when at very best the politician means ‘I’. So, apparently if Romanians moved in, ‘you’ would be concerned. This is because, says Farage, Romanians commit crimes. Here the word migrant is attached to criminality - one of the main props for selling newspapers for as long as anyone has been identified as a migrant. To sell this one, a politician has to be sure to avoid comparing like with like. Comparing crime figures by nationality doesn’t compare like with like. Nationalities come to a country with very different amounts of money in their pockets and cv’s in their bags. In this particular case, if we want to find out if there is or is not anything surprising or distinctive going on, a comparison might be fairer between, say, different groups of poor, young single males. Even so, criminality is not an objective measure. It’s a measure as done by the police. Since the Stephenson report, it is now public knowledge that how and why the police make arrests is not an unbiased matter.
But Farage’s purpose is to avoid nuance: keep it short - attach the word migrant to criminality.
And then he performs another old dodge of the anti-migrant - the verbal nudge-nudge. When asked why a Romanian moving in next door would be different from someone like Mrs Farage moving in, he says, ‘You know what I mean’.
This nudge-nudge phrasing is ideal if you don’t want to be accused of being racist. While saying everything, it appears to say nothing. It makes the listener responsible for the racism. The bad migrant, the invading neighbour is here attached to whatever bad thoughts might be swirling around in your mind. Given that newspapers have worked overtime for well over a hundred years suggesting that migrants have a particular interest (on account of being migrant) in committing unspeakable crimes, we might ask why wouldn’t I do as Farage suggests and nudge-nudge ‘know what he means’? In fact, some of us don’t. We resist the nudge.
And then back with the foreign language question, it’s clear that Farage would rather make the linguistic complexity of the migration very simple: foreigners speak foreign. And yet he must be intimately acquainted with how nuanced these things can be, how his wife has come, we might suspect, to be very fluent in English, how their children are growing up bilingual, how he too perhaps has some grasp of his partner’s language. How, as a family, they mingle words and expressions across at least two languages. And if he wanted to be honest, he could find out in a matter of minutes that this is precisely the situation that prevails in most migrant households...a mixture of language-use across two or more languages. Far from this being strange or problematical, this is what happens in billions of households all over the world. What is strange and problematical is that Farage appears to think that it’s strange or problematical. ‘Appears to’. Surely it isn’t problematical down at the Farages. So why is he saying that it is for others? Because the script of anti-migration-speak says to Farage, ‘Go on about foreigners talking foreign. Attach migrants to the idea that they get together in huddles precisely in order to stop you understanding what they’re saying. Suggest - without saying, that as migrants are attached to criminality, then you good English folks within earshot are entitled to think that the reason why foreigners talk foreign on our trains is so that they can plan to burgle your house, without you English people knowing about it. After all, before there were migrants, no one went burglaring. ‘
There was, Farage implies, a time when there was a pre-migrant London and this never-existing pre-migrant London was a burglar-free zone.
So, by comparing Obama’s rhetoric with that of Jenkin’s and Farage’s we can see that politicians have options on how to speak about migrants.
But so far, this talk has hardly touched on another matter in the language of migration, the voice of the migrants.
Let me get personal and as I do so, I hope you’ll compare your family and historical experiences of migration.
My father was born in the United States. He came to London when he was two. His father, who was born in Poland, stayed in the US along with two of my father’s brothers who had been born in London. My father’s mother was born in England. Her mother and father were born in Poland. I don’t expect you to remember any of that. Indeed in many migrant families, even family members find it hard to remember this sort of thing. It’s the stuff of a hundred stories, coincidences, losses, and strange meetings.
Poland for many Jewish emigrants was known in Yiddish, as ‘der Heim’ which literally means ‘home’ but it came to mean ‘the homeland’ or something more vague like ‘back there’. Again the culture of migration, creates popular shorthand phraseology that doesn’t tally neatly with the concerns of politicians with their cricket supporting tests and nationality exams. In the case of the term ‘der Heim’ it’s transnational, Jews of many different nationalities all over the world called it that. The language of migration crosses many borders.
In this passage I’m about to read you’ll hear the Yiddish words for grandfather which is ‘zeyde’, grandmother - which is ‘bubbe’ and a crazy person which is ‘meshuggene’. Part of the language of migrants is that they often talk in many tongues like this. Here’s my father writing:
“We would stand by the edge of the grubby old public swimming pool drying ourselves, my zeider and I. As likely as not he would tell me once again about how he would go swimming back in der heim somewhere in Poland. I would listen to this fragment of his boyhood. Always I saw him in some Arcadian setting of endless pine trees and velvet grass sloping down to a still lake. It was always early morning. He would emerge from a log cabin, run to the water and fracture its stillness with strong strokes. He would go on swimming till he was lost to view. There were no other people, no other houses, no other movements. It was an idyll I clung to from which I had banished pogroms and poverty and the fearful little community huddled over their prayers and sewing machines. That was my story not his. And when we went on day trips to Southend, East London’s seaside, in his sixties he would set out to swim the length of the pier and back, a mile or so each way. My bubbe without fail went through the identical torments of anxiety. ‘The meshuggene! He’s gone out too far again.’ I was free from all such fears. For he was always the intrepid boy swimmer in the pure lake who always came back. And he did. And even in death still does.’
So, my father carried about an image of another place, a mythic place of origin, which he shared with me and my brother through language.
And there’s this:
“Zeyde’s jokes baffled me at first and I would have to put on a phony laugh at stories I wasn’t ready for. He once told me of the great sage Rabbi Nachman. I’ve heard it in dozens of versions since. The old rabbi was on his deathbed, and his devoted disciples gathered round and took their last chance to ask him the great question.
‘Rabbi Nachman, tell us what is life?’
They waited for a long time, fearful that they would not hear a reply. At long last the rabbi gasped out, ‘Life - is like a fish.’
Baffled, they hastily conferred and came back to his bedside.
‘Rabbi Nachman, why is life like a fish?’
The old man looked at them,
‘So - it’s not like a fish.’
Zeyde gave the rabbi’s reply the tone of impatient irritation. How was this a joke? The adults loved it. Relished it and would repeat, ‘So? It’s not like a fish’ and fall about. In due course I came to laugh too.”
What do stories like this tell us?
Lines of language, thought and culture that persist across countries and across time. No matter what Jenkin and Farage say, the word migrant in my mind is much more attached to these lines than to the lines they want to make.
And though there’s nothing wrong with sentiment and nostalgia, from my position of comfort, it’s easy to forget that some of these lines are stories of persecution, separation, hardship, humiliation or worse.
In my father’s writing, there are memories of relatives talking about Cossacks charging at people in Russia but also of standing between his mother and grandfather on a demonstration during the General Strike of 1926. A few months ago, my step-mother came to the house with a little plastic jar full of odds and ends that had belonged to my father, some dating back to the 1920s. In amongst them, was a small brass brooch in the shape of a miner’s lamp. I looked it up on the internet and discovered that such brooches were sold to support the miners’ families who were on strike or locked out after everyone else went back to work during and after the General Strike. I can’t be certain, but it probably belonged to his mother or grandfather.
When I hear that the word ‘migrant’ has to be tested for its owner’s allegiance to Britain, I think that that’s only one kind of allegiance. Isn’t there an allegiance to the people around us? I have to spell it out for myself - perhaps for you, or perhaps not. Here are these people standing behind me, with their memories of a real or mythic heim, telling mythic jokes about Rabbi Nachman and buying a brooch to send money to South Wales, or Yorkshire or Lanarkshire for families who, according to the migrant-versus-native-Briton scenario, lived lives utterly different from my relatives, or indeed, said the propaganda of the day, utterly opposed to each other. Whichever of the two main stereotypes attached to Jews of the time: ‘as rich as Baron Rothschild’ or as ‘poor, stingy, filthy, greasy and jabbering’ as in William Makepeace Thackeray’s poem ‘The White Squall’, neither of them would have included buying a brooch for hungry miners’ families.
As I am doing right now, I write about such things.
Because of that, I, like other writers, become magnets for other people’s tales.My second cousin wrote to me a few years ago to say that his mother’s second husband had left behind some papers. In the papers there were letters and cards that had been sent from Poland and France during the Second World War. They were in German.
Sender:
Exp.
Rosen, 11 rue Mellaise Niort (Deux Sévres) France
Addressee: Monsieur
Max Rosen
96, West Cedar St. Boston (Mass)
S.A.
Niort, March 23, 1940
My dears,
Only today did I receive your dear letter dated February 29. I hope that you already received my card dated March 18. We are glad to hear that you are in good health and I can tell you the same from us. We were very pleased to receive your letter and we thank you very much. I just learned from you that dear Bella is no more in Biala. I tried to make inquiries but unfortunately I can’t get any information. I am very surprised that you have not yet received any news from Poland. You live in a neutral country, therefore it is much easier for you to find out something about our sisters in Poland. Who knows whether they are still alive. I am giving you the following addresses. Write immediately. Also let me know right away whether you received this card. You may also write to me in Yiddish. Tea Weinstock in Opoczno, ziemia Radomska. --- Stella Rechnitz, ulica Zeromskiego No. 17 in Dombrowa-Górnicza, bei Sosnowiec Poland.
I learned that it is best to write in Polish to Poland, and up to 25 words, not more.
If you receive a letter from Poland, only send me a copy.
Nothing else new, as I am awaiting good news.
Best regards,
Your brother, brother-in-law
Oscar
My dear wife also sends you many regards and wishes you the best. Awaiting immediate answers, as it takes very long.
and
Hand-written registered postcard with German stamps, airmail stamp, and a German military censorship stamp
Sender:
Bernard Rechnitz Dombrowa 6/S Schlesischestr. 14
Addressee: Mr.
Max Rosen Boston-Mass West Cedar 96 U.S.A.
Dombrowa, January 22, 1941
Dear Brother,
I have written to you several times and urged you fervently to take in my only child. Michal/ Marolka / Rechnitz in Joszkar – 6 Ta, Maryjskoja U.S.S.R. pocstowy Jasscryk No. 8 barack / 7. Sowjet Union.
He went sent way from Lemberg and only America can rescue him. Therefore I am fervently asking you to take the necessary steps immediately. Many thousands have already gone to America. I am asking you again and fulfill my request. I have sent you my son’s birth certificate. Born November 16, 1923 in Dombrowa 6/S.
What are you doing my dears? Kisses to you and your dear wife.
Maybe for now you can send him a few dollars? I beg you very much.
Hand-written postcard with German stamps and airmail stamp
Sender:
Bernard Rechnitz Dombrowa 6/S Schlesischestr. 14
Addressee: Mr.
Max Rosen Boston-Mass West Cedar 96 U.S.A.
Dombrowa, February 11, 1941
Dear Brother,
I hope you have already taken the steps to take in my son. Maybe you could adopt him to make this work?
Dear brother, I urge you. For now send him a few dollars and packages with food because he has nothing. I fervently urge you to send something as soon as possible. Don’t be upset with me but only you ? [remainder of the sentence is obscured by airmail stamp]
Kisses to you and to you dear wife and children.
Your sister StellaThen there are no more letters.
So, to be clear here, the letters survived because they were passed from the recipient, Max Rosen, to his son Ted, who left them with his divorced wife. She left them with her second husband and when he died they were passed on to his step-son, my second cousin, Ted jnr. I asked Ted jnr why his father hadn’t kept them. ‘My theory’, he said, is ‘because they were all ashamed that none of the senders of the letters, (or people mentioned in the letters) Stella,Bernard, Bella and Tea in Poland and Oscar and his wife in France survived beyond 1944.’
In France, civil servants who act as intermediaries between central and local government, the prefects and sub-prefects made lists of foreign born Jews - migrants that is - and handed them to the occupying power. (An example of how the official language of migration can be used.) Oscar and his wife were rounded up in Nice and sent to Paris, to the transit camp of Drancy, then to Auschwitz. Michael did survive - migration saved his life - another connotation which can be attached to the word migrant, ‘life-saving’. He spent all his working life as a London cab driver and lives in Stanmore. When we sent him these letters, he said that he had always wondered who sent him 50 dollars while he was in a Russian prison camp in Siberia and now he knew. It must have come from his cousin Max. Fragments of language preserved in letters across decades, suddenly solving old mysteries.
A few years ago, I was sitting in a classroom in Hackney and we were talking about the different languages we spoke and the different countries that people came from.
A child spoke to the teacher and I wrote down what he said:
He doesn’t speak English, miss.
He comes from the Congo, miss.
I translate for you, miss.
He says thgat the bad men take his grandfather, miss.
He says that the bad men take his grandmother, miss.
He says that the bad men take his dad, miss.
He says that the bad men take his mum, miss.
He doesn’t say how he got here, miss.
He can’t say how he got here, miss.
I’ll finish with what we might take as the mother of all interviews about migrants.. it provided the key word ‘swamp’ which along with synonyms, not used by Margaret Thatcher on this occasion - like ‘flood’ and ‘swarm’ - has provided metaphors for a thousand articles and speeches since. It was January 1978 and Margaret Thatcher connected ‘swamped’ with the words ‘people are really rather afraid’ followed a moment later with ‘fear’ and people being ‘rather hostile to those coming in’.
I think this is all I remembered from the interview, but going back over it, I find that I’ve forgotten a great deal. It was also here that Margaret Thatcher invoked the superiority of the British: ‘British characteristics that have done so much for the world’, and the essential item in the anti-migrant’s tool box the contrast between the the word ‘migrant’ and the word ‘people’ as in ‘The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.’ For a flicker of a second we could be forgiven here for thinking that the minority aren’t people. Or that the normal and good thing to be is ‘people’ and the strange scary thing is to be is a ‘minority’.
Whether intentionally or not, this language structure has been repeated a thousand times since. In the sentence, the ‘people’ are not the ‘minority’. If you’re going to play with contrasts and opposite, the linguistic counterpart to a ‘minority’ is a ‘majority’ . It’s not ‘people’. So we are shown, without it being said explicitly, that the minority are not people. As I’ve suggested, this kind of sentence’s comrade in arms is any that finds ways of reducing or distorting migrants into objects, as with ‘the endless supply of cheap labour’. Bernard Jenkin, you’ll remember, counterposed that phrase with ‘the public interest’.
What both Thatcher and Jenkin do with their language is to deliberately not give us a picture of a majority-minority making up a whole population, a whole people. They use all-inclusive words like ‘people’ and ‘public interest’ at the very same moment they are suggesting that there is a particular kind of non-human creature who is not part of that inclusiveness. In logical terms it’s an absurdity: migrants are part of the ‘people’. Migrants are part of the ‘public interest’. Everywhere that is, apart from in these kinds of sentences.
The British political scene is changing. Mark Reckless implied and then ‘unimplied’ that he thinks it would be desirable or necessary to deport migrants. Having flagged this up as a possibility, his head office denied it. It’s OK, the deed was done. The word ‘migrant’ was attached to the idea of deportation. If I was someone who says there are too many migrants, then the logical next step from there is to say that some of them must be got rid of, removed. If I was then wondering who would be the most likely party to do the removing then , surely I would now know that it would be Mark Reckless’s party even if the party did deny it, eh, nudge nudge.
Because they’ve denied it, we can’t quiz them on how precisely would these deportations be handled: what do they have in mind? snatch squads? armed guards? armoured trains? transit camps?
But this is an inadmissible conversation. It lies in the land behind and beyond the language of migration. In some ways, because it’s not said, it’s the most powerful use of language of all.
It’s in some people’s heads.
My response to Hackney winning the right to demolish Dalston Lane
(This is a copy of what I sent in to Hackney Citizen when they asked me to write something short for them.)
I wonder how it is that elected representatives can think they are doing a good job on behalf of the people, when they spend years neglecting fine historical buildings, longstanding tenancies and then spend thousands of pounds in court to justify demolishing the buildings with the argument that it was their neglect that made it necessary! And it's not as if tenants and concerned people didn't warn them and plead them and come with alternative ways of safeguarding Dalston Lane - going back over decades. To my own personal knowledge, I know that longstanding tenants, like the Austrian baker at the Star Bakery and newer tenants in the supermarket - and others - pleaded with Hackney to be able to renovate their shops but all Hackney could do was talk big about 'strings of investors' who would come in and bulldoze the lot and put up buy-to-rent blocks with chain stores down below. They were refused permission and packed their bags.
What we need all over London are local authorities who are prepared to build communities from the bottom up, supporting tenants and freeholders who want to do up the places they live and work in, supporting the longstanding networks of family and friendships, supporting housing for need. It shouldn't be the job of a local authority to smash up the spaces we live and work in simply because it suits big corporate developers.
I wonder how it is that elected representatives can think they are doing a good job on behalf of the people, when they spend years neglecting fine historical buildings, longstanding tenancies and then spend thousands of pounds in court to justify demolishing the buildings with the argument that it was their neglect that made it necessary! And it's not as if tenants and concerned people didn't warn them and plead them and come with alternative ways of safeguarding Dalston Lane - going back over decades. To my own personal knowledge, I know that longstanding tenants, like the Austrian baker at the Star Bakery and newer tenants in the supermarket - and others - pleaded with Hackney to be able to renovate their shops but all Hackney could do was talk big about 'strings of investors' who would come in and bulldoze the lot and put up buy-to-rent blocks with chain stores down below. They were refused permission and packed their bags.
What we need all over London are local authorities who are prepared to build communities from the bottom up, supporting tenants and freeholders who want to do up the places they live and work in, supporting the longstanding networks of family and friendships, supporting housing for need. It shouldn't be the job of a local authority to smash up the spaces we live and work in simply because it suits big corporate developers.
Monday 24 November 2014
Dalston Lane is an example of how urban planning is for greed not need
The socialist scholar, David Harvey, remarked some years ago that one of the sites for the way in which working people are squeezed is through the contest over space. This is of course through housing itself, but it's also through 'planning', 'development' and 'regeneration'. Big companies are involved in re-ordering cities so that they can make money from land. Quite often, this involves moving tenants out of dwellings, demolishing buildings and creating new enclaves which cost more to rent or buy than the previous tenants could pay. Again, quite often, councils - Labour, LibDem or Tory (or their equivalents all over the world) will bow to the will of developers pumping out propaganda about how this will 'improve the area' or 'regenerate the district' etc. All they are saying is that they moving poor people out and moving more well-off people in. Then when the chain stores come in and the better off people come in, they say, 'Look how we've improved the area!'. So, this justifies e.g. compulsory purchase, running down old stock housing, bulldozing, torching, bullying of tenants, lying about viability of historic buildings, etc etc. It may well also involve hidden subsidies to big corporations through absurdly low prices for land sales, waiving of local taxes, interest free loans, etc etc.
This whole process - often aided by legislation from central government (e.g. the Pathfinder legislation, brought in by John Prescott) - has been painstakingly documented and fought by OpenDalston and the heroic Bill Parry-Davies. Today was bad news…OPen Dalston contested in court the latest round of council vandalism in aid of corporate greed, altering the spaces we live in for the sake of profit not need…but lost.
There are parallel and analogous episodes going on all over UK and round the world. Please read this blog. We have to support each other in this or they will go on and on wiping out our living spaces without improving them. All they are doing is squeezing the poor by moving them on. It's not planning for all. It's planning for the well-off and the super-rich. As Harvey said, it's class war in another guise.
http://opendalston.blogspot.co.uk
This whole process - often aided by legislation from central government (e.g. the Pathfinder legislation, brought in by John Prescott) - has been painstakingly documented and fought by OpenDalston and the heroic Bill Parry-Davies. Today was bad news…OPen Dalston contested in court the latest round of council vandalism in aid of corporate greed, altering the spaces we live in for the sake of profit not need…but lost.
There are parallel and analogous episodes going on all over UK and round the world. Please read this blog. We have to support each other in this or they will go on and on wiping out our living spaces without improving them. All they are doing is squeezing the poor by moving them on. It's not planning for all. It's planning for the well-off and the super-rich. As Harvey said, it's class war in another guise.
http://opendalston.blogspot.co.uk
Friday 21 November 2014
David Whelan, money and Jews.
Dave Whelan (owner of Wigan Football Club)
who says that Jews chase money more than anyone else
should be asked if he chases money…
If not, he must be the first football club owner in history not to.
If he does chase money, then what's he complaining about?
Chasing money, in his book, must be 'good'. No?
Who cuts wages? Immigrants or employers?
I keep hearing that immigrants cut wages.
So who's that sitting in the board room fixing the wage levels?
Immigrants?
Or employers?
Let's try that again, then..
Who cuts wages?
Employers.
So who's that sitting in the board room fixing the wage levels?
Immigrants?
Or employers?
Let's try that again, then..
Who cuts wages?
Employers.
"Pressure on services" - immigrants or bankers?
I keep hearing that immigrants put pressure on services.
For the past four years, we've had government ministers explaining why and how they are putting pressure on services. They're cutting services. They have to do this because the international financiers say that it must be done.
So it's not immigrants putting pressure on services.
It's international financiers.
Funny that they don't say that.
For the past four years, we've had government ministers explaining why and how they are putting pressure on services. They're cutting services. They have to do this because the international financiers say that it must be done.
So it's not immigrants putting pressure on services.
It's international financiers.
Funny that they don't say that.
UKIP: immigrants 'welcome' or not?
If I was someone who thought that it would be a good idea to 'send immigrants home' , would I think that UKIP might do that for me?
Yes.
Why would I think that?
Because of many comments that UKIPers have said about immigrants e.g. Farage complaining about the Romanians talking on the train to Reckless's comments about 'looking sympathetically' at those who've been here a long time and/or might do his plumbing.
So if I was someone who thought UKIP was going to 'sort out immigration' what would I make of Reckless saying that European migrants are 'welcome'?
Does this mean that UKIP are going to let me down?
Or does it mean that UKIP give everyone a big nod, to say, yes we are anti-immigrant, er…we can't say that totally openly…but actually if we get into power, we'll get down to work shipping people out…????
Yes.
Why would I think that?
Because of many comments that UKIPers have said about immigrants e.g. Farage complaining about the Romanians talking on the train to Reckless's comments about 'looking sympathetically' at those who've been here a long time and/or might do his plumbing.
So if I was someone who thought UKIP was going to 'sort out immigration' what would I make of Reckless saying that European migrants are 'welcome'?
Does this mean that UKIP are going to let me down?
Or does it mean that UKIP give everyone a big nod, to say, yes we are anti-immigrant, er…we can't say that totally openly…but actually if we get into power, we'll get down to work shipping people out…????
Thursday 20 November 2014
New poem: Tomato
They’ve opened up a new cafe round our way
so I thought I’d give it a try. You go up to the
counter to choose and the menu is high up
on the wall. I saw ‘Homemade Tomato’.
I said, ‘I’ll have the Homemade Tomato, please.’
‘Anything else?’ the man said.
‘I’ll have a cup of tea with that, please.’
‘Usual?’ he said.
‘I haven’t been in this cafe before,’ I said.
‘I know you haven’t,’ he said, ‘I meant do you
want the tea you usually drink.’
‘Yes please,’ I said.
‘And what kind of tea is that?’ he said, ‘I don’t
know what kind of tea that is.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said, ‘I’ll have English
breakfast,’
‘I’ve got a breakfast tea here,’ he said, ‘but it
doesn’t say that it’s English.’
‘ I’m not bothered about the English,’ I said.
‘Oh aren’t you?’ he said, ‘It’s all got a bit political,
hasn’t it?’
‘I tell you what, I said, can I have a coffee? Black
Americano.’
He winked. I winked back. I wasn’t sure why I
winked. It felt like the right thing to do at the time.
I sat down.
A few minutes later he came to my table. He had
the coffee and a plate with a tomato on it. He
turned and went back to behind the counter. I
drank some coffee and started on the tomato. He
hadn’t brought a knife and fork, so I reckoned that
the best way to eat it was like you eat an apple.
Pick it up and bite into it. I took pretty small bites
because I’d been caught out like that before. You
take a big bite into a tomato and you end up with
tomato all over yourself. To tell the truth I’m not
mad keen on tomato by itself. I really like it with
bread. Or cut in half and grilled with toast. Or
chopped up with cucumber and Greek parsley
and a bit olive oil and lemon juice. He didn’t
have that on the menu.
Wednesday 19 November 2014
New poem: Radio
When I’m on my own I like to leave the radio on in
another room. I keep it at a level where I can’t hear
the words, just the sound of words. The other day
I was busy thinking, but the radio was putting me off. I
went in to the room in order to switch it off. In the
room there was a woman interviewing a man. The
man was lying on the floor. She was asking him if he
saw the car. ‘Did you see the car?’ she said.
He said, ‘I’m not on benefits.’
She said, ‘I’m not asking you that. I’m trying to find out
about the incidence of accidents.’
I said, ‘I’m trying to find out about the incidence of
incidents.’
She said, ‘This is an accident black spot.’
I got in very quickly: ‘“Treasure Island”!’
The man lying on the floor said, ‘The Black Spot!’
That’s it. It’s all over.’
She said, ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that,you’re
just a bit shaken up.’
‘Robert Louis Stevenson!’ I said very quickly.
She looked at me.
I said, ‘The ‘Louis’ is pronounced ‘Lewis’ but spelt
L,O,U,I.S. Lewis. Though when you say it quickly you
don’t know. It could be Louis or Lewis.
RobertLouisStevenson. Like that. On its own, though,
you could tell. Lewis. But spelt, L,O.U.I.S.’
We spent a few minutes practising saying
‘RobertLouisStevenson’.
New poem: Chair
I needed a chair. At the shop the man said that
there was a new Smart Chair.’
He said, ‘It anticipates chair use.’
I said, ‘So, is it like there’s an agreement between
me and the chair? I do what it anticipates I’ll do.’
He said, ‘I think it’s more of a prognosis.’
I said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve never known what the
difference is between a prognosis and a
diagnosis.’
He said, ‘I have that problem too.’
I said, ‘What about the chair?’
He said, ‘I don’t think the chair has a problem.’
‘That’s good,’ I said.
He said, ‘Would you like to use the chair sir?’
I said, ‘I would love to use the chair.’
I sat on it.
‘It’s very good,’ I said.
‘How would you describe the sitting experience,
sir?’
I said, ‘It’s...like...sitting. First I sat down and now
I’m sitting on.’
He made a note.
He said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’
‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘it’s a chair I’m after today.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘And so does the chair, I expect,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘the chair doesn’t
know that you want to buy a chair.’
Tuesday 18 November 2014
New poem: Washing machine
I went to a washing machine re-fit place. Stacks
of washing machines. It was like washing-machine
castle-walls in there. There was a room at the back.
I walked through to it. On one of the machines it
had a bright pink star. On the star it said, ‘De-shrinker
fitted’. I went over to the guy and said, ‘Excuse me, it
says on one of your machines it’s fitted with a
de-shrinker. What’s a de-shrinker?’
‘If you got something that shrunk, it de-shrinks it.’
‘Takes it back to normal size?’
‘Yup,’ he said.
‘How does it do that?’ I said.
‘I don’t fit them,’ he said, ‘I’m the muscle.’
‘Is it more expensive because it’s got the de-
shrinker on board?’ I said.
‘I’ll have a look,’ he said.
He opened a fat book, ran down a list with his
thumb-nail.
‘Yep, you pay extra for the de-shrinker.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’ll take one without.’
‘Please yourself,’ he said, ‘but you don’t want to
be the kind of guy who turns some tasty sweater
into a doll top and then comes running in here
giving me a hard time because you didn’t buy the
one with the de-shrinker.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll take one without.’
‘You’re not the type who takes risks, are you?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘there are pizzas I’ve never tried.’
‘We don’t do pizzas,’ he said.
‘You do washing machines,’ I said.
‘You got it,’ he said.
Monday 17 November 2014
New poem: Prompter
I was on a bus when two people sitting behind me
started to talk to me. I said I lived nearby. They said
they did too. I said that I had lived here when I was
young. They said they hadn’t lived here long. They
had met while they were doing a play. I asked them
if they were actors. Oh no, they weren’t actors. They
were just in a play. Well, said one to the other, you
were in the play and I was the prompt.
‘Really?’ I said, ‘did you do prompting every night
when the play was on?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
Then the other one said, ‘And then we were in another
play and she had a part and it was me who did the
prompting.’
‘Did you ever have to actually prompt?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she forgot a line to do with the
radioactivity of a toaster.’
‘And one night you forgot something too,’ she replied.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said back.
‘Yes, the thing with the man next door who used to
do weightlifting.’
‘No, when you prompted, you dived in before I said it.
I was trying to do a new pause.’
‘I don’t think you’d have got to the right words.’
‘I would have. I know I would have. I know what I was
thinking. You don’t.’
‘I think you think you know what you’re thinking - which
is a different matter.’
‘There are times when I would like to have a prompt,’
I said.
It was that moment in the day in winter when the lights
of the shops start to be brighter than the light outside.
Sunday 16 November 2014
New poem: Beard
There’s a cafe I go to when I’ve got time to kill.
I was sitting having a drink and a tomato sandwich
when a guy sat down at my table. He kept
looking at me. I tried to ignore him. Then he said,
‘I hate beards.’
I’ve got a beard. I looked at him. He had a beard.
New poem: Music
There’s a road near to where I live where
men sit in cars listening to music. I walk
past them trying to figure out if there’s any
kind of link between them. They don’t listen
to the same kind of music. They’re not the
same age. Their cars aren’t the same. They
come to the same street. They sit in cars.
They listen to music. They drive off. I know
that they listen to music because it’s loud
enough to hear outside the car. Sometimes
it’s radio: Capital, Heart, Kiss, Radio 1,
Radio 2, Radio 3, Classic FM, Jazz Fm and
radio stations I don’t know. Some days it’s
music I want to hear. I stop and listen. They
don’t seem to mind. They don’t get out and
say, ‘Stop listening to my music.’ I don’t think
I’ve ever seen one of them ever get out. Not
even that thing you have to do when you
sit in a car for a long time, open the door, get
out, shake your legs about and get back in.
They never do that. I don’t know how long
they stay. I walked past one of them once
and it must have been loud enough for the
people in the house to hear. It was very early.
You would wake up and hear that in your
bedroom. You would want to come down
and knock on the car window and say:
‘Excuse me, I was asleep.’
But then, he would just say, ‘You’re not now,
though.’
Or you could come down and say,
‘Excuse me, have you got any Tamla Motown?’
And he would say, ‘No.’
One night there was an old man doing it.
Very, very old with a white beard. I didn’t
recognise the music. I’m guessing but it could
have come from Turkey. He was smiling. That’s
another thing. They don’t usually smile. This
one was smiling. He was still there in the
morning. The music was on. He was asleep.
I think he was asleep. No way of knowing for
certain.
Tristram Hunt did not say this
Here's the speech that Tristram Hunt did not make yesterday, is not making today and won't make tomorrow:
'I would just like to say that no matter what shortcomings our education service had in the past, I would like to put in on record that comprehensive education resulted in more children getting more education than children had ever done before and getting more qualifications than children had ever done before. This meant that the kinds of children and young people previously thought uneducable were brought into education for the first time in our history.
This required a new generation of teachers to adapt their teaching. It wasn't easy. It's still not easy. For a start, children's lives have changed, the conditions for thousands of children and young people has got worse, inequality sets up many problems for young people who are told by the world of consumer goods that they must have more stuff in order to be complete.
But make no mistake, we have to have a system of education that does its best to give everyone the same chances. That means thinking of every child, every young person. We can't have a system where one part competes against another, or one school competes against another - because competition means winners and losers. It's not right and it's not fair, to build in losers into education. Education is about learning, growing and discovering. It shouldn't be about beating the other guy.
So we will be phasing out private education, we will bring all schools under the umbrella of local authorities. Not the old kind of local authorities. We will create a new kind of local education board to run education in the local authorities, made up of representatives of teachers, parents and students. Nationally, we will set up five congresses: political, teaching, parents, students and researchers. These congresses will discuss what they want from education, commission investigations and research, produce materials which express this work. Representatives from each of the congresses will meet up in a new National Education Congress to develop policies.
Bit by bit, the shape of education will emerge from this work. It will take forms that I can't predict - which is rather a good thing - because like anyone else in my job, my background and interests are of one particular kind. No one in this job can or should run education. It has to be run by everyone in education for everyone in society. That is how progress will happen. We will start to see education as a growing point for making society serve everyone's needs not serving the needs of some better than others.'
'I would just like to say that no matter what shortcomings our education service had in the past, I would like to put in on record that comprehensive education resulted in more children getting more education than children had ever done before and getting more qualifications than children had ever done before. This meant that the kinds of children and young people previously thought uneducable were brought into education for the first time in our history.
This required a new generation of teachers to adapt their teaching. It wasn't easy. It's still not easy. For a start, children's lives have changed, the conditions for thousands of children and young people has got worse, inequality sets up many problems for young people who are told by the world of consumer goods that they must have more stuff in order to be complete.
But make no mistake, we have to have a system of education that does its best to give everyone the same chances. That means thinking of every child, every young person. We can't have a system where one part competes against another, or one school competes against another - because competition means winners and losers. It's not right and it's not fair, to build in losers into education. Education is about learning, growing and discovering. It shouldn't be about beating the other guy.
So we will be phasing out private education, we will bring all schools under the umbrella of local authorities. Not the old kind of local authorities. We will create a new kind of local education board to run education in the local authorities, made up of representatives of teachers, parents and students. Nationally, we will set up five congresses: political, teaching, parents, students and researchers. These congresses will discuss what they want from education, commission investigations and research, produce materials which express this work. Representatives from each of the congresses will meet up in a new National Education Congress to develop policies.
Bit by bit, the shape of education will emerge from this work. It will take forms that I can't predict - which is rather a good thing - because like anyone else in my job, my background and interests are of one particular kind. No one in this job can or should run education. It has to be run by everyone in education for everyone in society. That is how progress will happen. We will start to see education as a growing point for making society serve everyone's needs not serving the needs of some better than others.'
Saturday 15 November 2014
Literacy theory into practice: oral to written and back to oral with my poetry videos
The wonderful guy who does my website, Mark James Foster, has put captions on nearly all my videos (last ones coming soon) which show which books the poems come from. I'm hoping that teachers and parents will use this to enable children to make the leap from oral to written and back again.
I am of the belief that some young children don't quite realise that what we say can be written down. That's to say, the written language is so separate from the oral in their lives that they feel quite estranged from the written mode. I've always hoped that many of my poems help children make that leap. (There is a theory about literacy hiding in all this!)
With the videos now having been 'viewed' over 8 million times, I'm rather late in the day hoping that these captions will help this matter to be explicit and obvious. But better to do it now than not at all!
If you don't want to view the 'poops' or 'YTPs' which are mash=ups of my videos, and you only want to see my videos - I mean the ones that my son Joe Rosen and I made (not other people) then please view my videos through my website only or through the 'artifice design' channel.
www.michaelrosen.co.uk
New poem: Platform
I was on a station and I needed to get somewhere
quickly. I went up to the guy in uniform, showed him
the name of the place on a bit of paper. He looked
up at the notice board and said,
‘You won’t be able to get there now.’
I said, ‘I’m stuck then.’
‘You haven’t got any bags, have you?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘I’ll tell you what I can do for you,’ he said, ‘I have got a
platform over here,’ and he flicked his head to the right.
‘Really?’
‘This is just between me and you, OK?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Just follow me.’
He took me along to the end of platform 12 and then
ducked down behind a shed. He pulled me down with
him. He nodded towards the next platform and put his
finger up to his lips. I kept quiet. He looked at his watch.
‘OK,’ he whispered, and then beckoned me to follow
him again. We climbed down off the platform and
walked across several sets of railway lines. Trains were
passing. I wanted to tell him that I was only going to
visit my brother and it could wait. I kept close behind
him. I like railway lines shining when the light is fading.
I wondered how many lines there were. Not just railway
lines but lines above, cutting through the sky. We were
some way off from the station by now. We were walking
by the side of a hoarding. I was next to a woman’s legs.
A giant woman. With giant legs. He took me round behind
the hoarding. There was a single track.
‘Wait there,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be alright. Remember,’
he said, ‘nothing about this to anyone, OK?’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘when will the train go?’ I said.
He looked at his watch.
‘Later,’ he said, ‘yep, later.’
Friday 14 November 2014
New poem: Corridor
I was knocked over in the road near our house
and was in hospital for several months. When
they thought I was well enough, they said that
I should try to walk. They took me to the door
of the ward and said, ‘Walk down the corridor.’
I looked ahead. There were double doors and
beyond that more double doors and beyond that
more double doors and perhaps more beyond
that. I thought of other corridors.
They said, ‘Just think of one step at a time.’
I had forgotten how to walk. I put one foot
forward. The other foot wouldn’t move very far.
It was OK about coming up alongside the first
foot. But it wouldn’t go on. It stopped right there.
Alongside the first foot.
‘Put one hand on the wall, if you want.’
I looked ahead to the double doors. I could get
there, I thought, so long as I don’t try anything
clever. Don’t try that thing where you put one
foot forward and swing the other foot past the
first foot. So I did one foot forward, bring the
other foot up to join it. One foot forward, bring
the other foot up to join it. I looked ahead. There
was no end to the corridor.
Thursday 13 November 2014
New poem: Testing
Billy has a blue hat.
What colour is Billy's hat?
Blue
Correct. One mark.
It is raining. Why is Billy wearing a hat?
Because he supports Chelsea.
Wrong. No mark.
Notes for a cultural politics and a political culture - 25 subversive ideas
1. In the place that gets called 'left-of-Labour' or the 'radical left' or the 'alternative left', there have been all sorts of shifts and realignments. This is not as new as it looks. They happen all the time. The big ones happen when the most vociferous, most successful of the groupings goes through a crisis.
2. The real crisis for the 'radical left' is that we have failed to dent the politicians-media agreement about how to present the economic crisis. This agreement runs something like this: some bankers did some silly things…the result was a lot of debt and a credit squeeze…Labour did some silly things…the only way out of it is for government to spend less…this means that we must all agree that to save our skins, we must cut public spending…and we must freeze or cut wages…the only people who can be trusted to do this are the Tories.
3. We know that this is a hoax. Even quite right-wing politicians like Alan Johnson call it a 'fat lie'. In fact, there are several lies. The bankers (and all the other financiers) weren't just naughty. They smashed up big sections of the system that enables capitalism to operate. Through our governments' actions all over the world, we have been taxed to keep that system solvent. Through our governments' actions we have lost large sections of our welfare, education and cultural institutions - hospitals, schools, social services, benefits. Through our governments' actions, people's wages have been cut and/or people put out of work.
4. While this has been going on, the super-rich, the hyper-rich have got richer. The main reason why they have got richer is because the 'cost' of employing people has gone down. I say 'cost' in inverted commas, because it's only a 'cost' from the point of view of those who employ. For everyone else it's their 'income' or 'spending power'. People don't see themselves as a 'cost' nor should they!
5. So, 'austerity' is in fact, a realignment, a shuffling. It's the means by which the poor stay poor (or are made poorer) and the rich to stay rich (or get richer). It's nothing to do with the money that Labour did or did not borrow during its time in power. It's entirely to do with the decisions that are made by financiers, finance ministers and giant corporations. Having taken risks that failed (on a massive scale, involving all sorts of gigantic fiddles and cons), they are trying to claw back solvency through making the mass of people work for less money and have much less by way of public services and benefits.
6. The 'radical left' has been saying this throughout the time of the crisis. However, we haven't dented the consensus. This argument is hardly ever heard. Or, when it's heard, very little happens. There are of course sporadic and brave efforts by people to defend jobs, wages and services. But, if we are ruthless and honest with ourselves, what has happened is that this hasn't spread far and wide. It hasn't become 'generalised', as the jargon has it.
7. And, just as importantly, it hasn't enabled us all to see clearly that 'wealth' isn't really what turns up in the figures on bankers' computer screens. It isn't even really 'money'. Wealth is what we make and do with our minds and bodies. We work in places made with the past effort of the minds and bodies of our forbears. All the machines and infrastructure that enable goods and services to be produced and pass between us are made through the past and present effort of people's minds and bodies.
8. When the 'economic' crisis happened, that 'wealth' didn't change. We all had our minds and bodies; the buildings, roads, machines were all still there. But they told us that 'we' were in a crisis. That the money that we had to spend would be less and that those parts of our wealth that we had created through government spending (health, schools, social services) would suddenly have to be less. Now some of us, me included, thought that at that moment, perhaps people would challenge this view by occupying their places of work and in so doing would be saying, 'No, nothing has changed. We make these things, we produce things. The only thing that has got screwed up here is the present system's way of financing things. We didn't do that. It's nothing to do with us. We don't run banks. We don't lend money. So we'll hang on to our wealth. We won't let you take that away from us, so that you can save your skins and save the system that goes in to these kinds of crisis.'
9. I was completely wrong. It didn't happen. The 'radical left' has of course supported people who've tried to defend their jobs, wages and services. But that's about it.
10. Why?
11. One argument says that it's because the 'left' - (not the 'radical left') - is too much in hock to the banking system to be able to stand apart from it and throw rocks at it. So even as it talks about the 'cost of living crisis', it comes up with policies which also involve cutting jobs, wages and services. This is confusing, demoralising and ultimately plays into the hands of the real cutters and slashers. Why vote Labour to cut your jobs, wages and services when you can vote for the real thing with the Tories and UKIP?!
12. And this 'left' (represented in the UK by the Labour Party), so the argument goes, involves drawing millions of people in, into thinking that it is opposing the system that is cutting jobs, wages and services to save the bankers, whilst not actually doing it.
13. My own view is that I agree, but I think there is something deeper going on too. These are to do with 'allegiance' and 'passivity'.
14. Our allegiance to the system is won. We are invited to believe in 'free enterprise', the 'market' or 'capitalism'. However, it's clear that our allegiance is won not just because we are constantly told it's all lovely. There is the matter of our needs, wants and desires. Our basic needs are to do with being healthy and able to reproduce - have babies. Our wants and desires are complex matters to do with how we are socialised, conditioned and 'seduced' - that's to say we are coaxed, cajoled and massaged to long for many goods and services we may not actually 'need'. In fact, it's all so powerful that they often feel like 'needs'. It's obvious that capitalism is utterly brilliant at creating these desires. In the jargon, they are 'constructed'. Our longing for this or that shirt, or shoes, or film or phone can start to be the apparent 'meaning' of our lives: 'I am worthy because I have that particular phone.' My firm belief is that we on the left have failed in coming to terms with this. We have some strange schizoid attitude to it, where on the one hand we say 'Aha, look, the hidden persuaders and admen-conmen are at work, it's all a capitalist conspiracy' (that's our killjoy side). And on the other we say, 'Ha, look at me, I'm having fun, I'm watching a Bruce Willis movie and I had a good time…' (that's the guilty pleasure side). I think we need some other way of looking at this…and I have the feeling that it can only be handled and challenged 'culturally' - but I'll come back to that. Moaning about it from the lofty heights of a small left grouping or an academic department at a university has zero effect.
The part of the allegiance matter that is most puzzling is the conundrum of why people who cannot afford what they desire are sometimes the people who express the strongest allegiance! Some of us, me included, naively thought that the 'contradiction' of the system, whereby the system creates 'desire' but cannot pay enough for those who 'desire' to have what they desire, would in the end destroy the system! Oh no, no, no, no, no! How wrong could I be?! Yes, indeed, the system throws people out of work, freezes wages, cuts wages, while it beams at us the desirability of this car, this phone, this perfume, this 'look'. Millions of people can't afford this stuff, even though it's coming at us every minute of every day through TV, film, newspapers and indeed through people we encounter who've got that stuff, or bits of that stuff. The 'lack' of it does not seem to detach people from the system that creates the desire for it. And yet it's that system that freezes the wages and takes away our hospital.
Again, I don't think we have got anywhere near cracking this. One theory has it that the only (yes the 'only') way it can be cracked is when people take action to defend their jobs, wages and services. Perhaps that's right. Perhaps, though, there is a 'cultural' battleground here too...
15. Passivity - this is the tendency for people to prefer not to take action. I believe that passivity is created. It's not simply 'there'. It's not simply 'personal' either. Passivity is, if you like, a 'cultural product'. It is produced out of certain processes that take place 'socially' i.e. to many of us, in certain positions in society. It feels personal but is in fact social.
I think there are two main motors that create passivity: debt and one particular aspect of education.
16. Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system. With the massive amounts of everyone's debt, the only people who can 'forget' or ignore or not care very much about their debts are the very rich. Large sections of those who earn a living solely through wages and salaries are now in debt.
17. Education - one of the features of modern capitalism is its need for universal education (in one form or another) from around 4 years old to 18. For the system not to be rocked or undermined by this (which some people used to think would come about if you let the masses have education), then even as more and more education is 'given' so must systems be put in place which ensure allegiance to the system - even if the outcome (job or no job), is not guaranteed. The allegiance is won, through two main processes: the testing, examining regime; the behaviour management regime.
Under testing and examining the lie is maintained that 'anyone can succeed'. While it looks as if that's true, 'anyone' is not the same as 'everyone', as all school and national exams are rigged so that a given percentage will get top marks, a given percentage will get medium marks and a given percentage will fail. (Compare that to the driving test, say, where you succeed if you can do the test.) So 'anyone' can pass a school exam but it will so happen that 'everyone' won't. However, saying that 'anyone' can pass is what wins the allegiance to the system. We all try to pass the exam. As we do that, we can't question the validity of the system which ranks and grades according to the narrow criteria of the test itself. The test must be 'right' to test us in these things because…well…it's the test! It's the test that they've devised to find out our 'true' worth. And 'anyone' can pass! If however, it looks as if I can't pass or am not going to pass, it must be 'my' fault! It can't possibly be 'social'. I can't possibly be failing because a percentage of us are already designated to fail. It can't possibly be because my kind of abilities are not rated as good. It can't possibly be because it's crazy to call people who don't pass exams 'failures' when it might all be about different kind of 'abilities' and 'capabilities'.
I believe that all this kind of thinking is a great motor for passivity. Many people take with them from school a sense that 'I' am a failure, because 'I' couldn't pass. So, when in the outside world, people appeal to our capabilities, our ability or willingness to 'do', to 'make', to 'take action', it's difficult. Our first assumption is that 'I' am not good enough.
Under testing and examining the lie is maintained that 'anyone can succeed'. While it looks as if that's true, 'anyone' is not the same as 'everyone', as all school and national exams are rigged so that a given percentage will get top marks, a given percentage will get medium marks and a given percentage will fail. (Compare that to the driving test, say, where you succeed if you can do the test.) So 'anyone' can pass a school exam but it will so happen that 'everyone' won't. However, saying that 'anyone' can pass is what wins the allegiance to the system. We all try to pass the exam. As we do that, we can't question the validity of the system which ranks and grades according to the narrow criteria of the test itself. The test must be 'right' to test us in these things because…well…it's the test! It's the test that they've devised to find out our 'true' worth. And 'anyone' can pass! If however, it looks as if I can't pass or am not going to pass, it must be 'my' fault! It can't possibly be 'social'. I can't possibly be failing because a percentage of us are already designated to fail. It can't possibly be because my kind of abilities are not rated as good. It can't possibly be because it's crazy to call people who don't pass exams 'failures' when it might all be about different kind of 'abilities' and 'capabilities'.
I believe that all this kind of thinking is a great motor for passivity. Many people take with them from school a sense that 'I' am a failure, because 'I' couldn't pass. So, when in the outside world, people appeal to our capabilities, our ability or willingness to 'do', to 'make', to 'take action', it's difficult. Our first assumption is that 'I' am not good enough.
18. The second area of passivity-creation (!) is, I think, through the systems of behaviour management in education. It is of course reasonable to think that a school is entitled to be run so that people don't hurt or bully each other. The question though is who runs the means by which this point is achieved? This is of course called 'discipline' and millions of pounds are spent each year by 'management' and 'management training' in inventing 'discipline' systems all the way from smiley face charts, to detentions, sanctions, classroom management, attendance and lateness rules, uniform transgressions, haircuts, piercings etc etc. At the heart of it all is one simple rule: discipline is run by the school management, not by the pupils. For most children and students, this has the effect of leaving unquestioned the idea of 'unchosen hierarchy'. That's to say, for most of us, most of the time, our experience of the way things are run is that the people who run and control our lives are not chosen by us. The hoax is that we are 'free' and 'choose' our politicians who 'run' the country. In fact, our politicians are mostly doing what the huge corporations and bankers want them to do. Thus the cuts in jobs, wages and services. We only choose them once every four or five years. And mostly the choice between them is about which of them will cut our jobs, wages and services the most, the most quickly, the most often…marginally.
Meanwhile, in our places of work, in our institutions and our places of leisure, hierarchies run our lives through unchosen managers. They are 'appointed'. Some managers do all they can to be 'inclusive' and to invite 'participation' and to be as 'democratic' as they can - particularly in institutions where we do work we enjoy doing e.g. in the theatre or indeed in some parts of education - hurrah for that and hurrah for them. On the other hand, the daily experience of most people is that not only are such people unchosen by the people 'under' them, but also that this layer of management has invented and created a massive cult of bullshit to justify the hierarchy. 'Discipline' in schools is largely a result of this. The best disciplines (if we want to call them that) are the systems by which people collectively agree to run daily affairs in whatever institution we find ourselves in - whether that's a tiny book group, a parents' association, a political grouping or whatever. It is only when we arrive in these other institutions and workplaces we have to buy into the idea that some special wisdom and authority lies in the hands of 'managers'.
The way this feeds down into children and students is, I believe, fundamental to how most of us view power and authority. That is that power and authority have the right to rule simply because they are the power and have the authority! So, to take one example: every day we hear of the 'crisis' in leadership in this or that political party, or in this or that institution or workplace or firm. Then there is a debate about 'who' might or could be better. All this does is require us to go on thinking that whatever that 'crisis' is, that it can be solved by this or that 'leader'…and we aren't invited to think that actually the problem is with the hierarchy itself. The rule is: hierarchy must not be questioned, hierarchy is good, and hierarchy must not be chosen. As it happens, I think that in many circumstances we do indeed need hierarchies, but these must be hierarchies who are chosen by those who are organised or 'run' by that hierarchy. In other words, we should choose people to organise and run us - for a specific time and we have the right to withdraw them. (I do realise that in most circumstances in the present this is 'ideal' and 'utopian'!) However, in terms of 'passivity' our present state is one in which we are constantly in a position of accepting what hierarchies do and in so doing leave unquestioned the idea that we cannot run affairs co-operatively or collectively or through choosing our hierarchies. We have to be ruled. We are unruly if we are not ruled!
I believe that these ideas are bedded down and reinforced every day we are 'run' or organised or disciplined by hierarchies that are unchosen and uncontrolled by us. And these ideas breed passivity: 'I can't do or make or take action because it's only managers, and rulers and bosses and clever people up there who can do that. I can't or 'we' can't…'
19. So what does all this mean for the 'radical left'? Firstly, the mistake the radical left keeps making is that much of it thinks that it can oppose allegiance and passivity by creating organisations that have hierarchies that are in effect unmoveable themselves! Nominally, they are chosen and elected but in effect, they keep coming up with the same faces. This is enabled (or engineered?) through systems by which the 'members' are invited to vote for the same grouping as they voted for last year. If this package (or 'slate' or 'panel') is also packed with people whose wages are paid for by that organisation, then there is an in-built removal of initiative and activity from the members. The hierarchy is 'chosen' but not 'chosen'. And there is a lack of initiation into learning the ropes of how to run things, how to organise, and how to respond to events - with direction and activity of the members who chose you to do that. So, in a cycle of about once every 25 years, a left grouping will go through a crisis caused by this freezing up which will be triggered off by such things as some crazy party-line-changing, a financial irregularity, or shitty personal behaviour matter or some such. In fact, it's not the 'offence' itself that's the problem, it's the hierarchical system - which has turned out to be not that different from the kinds of hierarchies that are in place in our workplaces!
20. The second big mistake is cultural. This requires a bit of definition. In daily speech, we separate out things into categories, like 'economic', 'political' and 'cultural'. By that we mean that 'economic' is money, political is Tory/Labour/LibDem etc and cultural is movies, theatre, music and the like. Now, what happens if we think of these things for a moment as all the same: that's to say, what a politician says is cultural, political and economic all at the same time??? So, let's say, Miliband makes a speech in which he says that he would like to see such and such a kind of Britain. This will of course involve an 'economic' view of how we are organised to produce the things we need and want. It will be political in the sense that it contains a view in how Britain is run politically. And both the content and method of what he is saying is cultural. That's to say, 'Britain' is a cultural idea. It is in part created through Britain's cultural institutions. Culture proclaims 'Britain' as an entity and keeps on defining what is 'British'. What's more, the medium of the 'big speech' is itself a piece of culture. We can examine it in terms of why is it nearly always a man who gives it, why does he wear a suit and tie and a white shirt (in Britain)? Why do the people listening sit in rows, many of whom look at the backs of the heads of other people sitting in rows? What other cultural institutions are like it? Sermons, stand-up comedy, solo singing…And so on.
21. So what happens if we take this 'economic-political-cultural' way of looking at things and use it to look at what we do in the 'radical left'? Well, it becomes pretty clear immediately, that we go on doing almost the same things as those people we oppose! In the specifics of here and now, we keep on having meetings where one person stands in front of us (while we sit in rows looking at the back of people's heads) and talks at us for half an hour. We keep on distributing printed material that looks (to a Martian outsider just landing on earth) much the same as the very same printed material we say is full of lies and distortions - tabloid newspapers. We distribute leaflets that look very much like the leaflets that are distributed on those occasions that the main political parties want to convince us to vote for them. So, though the economic and political content may be different, the cultural quality of what's being offered is almost the same.
22. Now, if we go back to my argument about 'allegiance', it's my belief that this matter of the 'economic-political-cultural' assault that we need to make is crucial. So, of course, allegiance to the system is won 'economically' (to accept that distinction for a moment) through the fundamental matter of the 'contract' i.e. we go to work, and agree to the financial and organisational deal whereby we will be paid i.e. I am a wage earner a salary earner or receiver of a fee and in so doing I am agreeing to accept that you the boss will pay me because you are the boss and - crucially, you will make a profit out of the work that I will do for you.
As I've suggested, allegiance is also won through debt and fear of non-payment.
But - according to my argument above - our allegiance (and our reasons for not taking action) is also won culturally through passivity. My argument therefore is that the 'radical left' must constantly look, review and change its 'culture'. It has to enable all who take part to take part in something that is new and different culturally. It must offer new and different cultural events. It must create ways in which people can control how things are organised - whether through hierarchies that are chosen or through other forms.
23. If we put that together that means looking beyond the old ritual of meetings, papers, assemblies, conferences which reproduce what the people we oppose do - and therefore tend to reproduce the same kinds of behaviour. We have to offer people chances and opportunities to experience what it's like to not be in the kinds of situation that are the same as workplaces. In that way we challenge one of the key means by which the system wins allegiance - through passivity. In concrete terms this means looking back at what the radical left has done in the past for clues as to what we an do now and to get into thinking about new things. So, for example, there was Rock Against Racism. Was that useful, challenging, important? Did it have any effect? How was it organised? What can we learn from that? Are there any (past or present) festivals, groupings, entertainments, schools, courses, associations, political parties, assemblies, concerts, events…etc etc... which seem able to challenge 'allegiance' and passivity not only by what was on offer (i.e. what it put on show) but also through how it was organised?
24. In doing such things, we also engage with the core idea of 'what does it mean to be political'. So, though many of us on the radical left say things like 'everything is political' more often than not we are uneasy with a notion like say, 'feelings are political'. Or, put it another way, we are uneasy with the idea that our empathy and compassion (or lack of it!) aroused by a piece of music or a dance is 'political'. Or even if we are OK with that, it's not clear what we should do, if anything, about it. We tend to be much happier accepting the distinctions given to us by society that we 'do' politics by holding a meeting, and we 'do' culture by going to a concert. To take Rock Against Racism as one example only, it was clear that we 'did' cultural politics and political culture at the same time. And that's NOT because everyone who played or sang, produced explicit messages about anti-racism! Far from it, a good deal of the cultural politics and political culture was because, for example, bands of different cultural traditions played together…or that audiences were 'mixed' and many other subversive cross-currents were produced.
I am far from saying that the only or the best thing we can do is just produce another Rock Against Racism….though a rock against austerity might have legs??? Perhaps…Much more important would be to think through what a 'cultural politics' and a 'political culture' could look like tomorrow, for any of us, wherever we are, and how might we link up or hook up these things.
24. Please feel free to copy and distribute this wherever and however you want. Please feel free to discuss it wherever and however you want. You don't need to ask my permission to reproduce it or share it. It would be nice (i.e. feed my ego) if you said who wrote it, but I can't and won't do anything about it if you do.
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