Sedgehill: story of a school being forced to be an academy

Hi Michael


I've long followed your support of schools under threat of academisation. I'm the mother of two children at Sedgehill, a community comprehensive in Lewisham. The school was in a very bad way four years ago. Morale was low, numbers on roll were falling, and the Head resigned suddenly. Ken McKenzie took over and completely transformed the school. It's now a very special place - a true community where every child is accepted, no matter what their background or level of academic achievement, and where their potential is nurtured, whether it be with free music tuition, dance training, time in the recording studio, training with Fulham Football Club, mentoring younger children, being involved in the Youth Parliament or learning to be a Young Entrepeneur.


GCSE results have been steadily rising, until a dip this year caused by changes to the system (and shared by many many schools across the country) was taken as a cue by Lewisham council to intervene.


They instructed the board of governors to replace the Head with their own choice, the Head of Bethnal Green Academy. When the Governors refused, they were given notice that an application was being made to impose an Interim Executive Board to disband the governors, sack the Head and take over the running of the school.


This is against the wishes of the entire school community. The school is NOT failing; it has lifted from special measures to inadequate to requires improvement (the category that was until recently called satisfactory). Although at the 2013 inspection it was still at a 3 (requires improvement) the school is confident that when next inspected it will achieve a 2 (good).


Although the council are saying that a full consultation on academisation will be held after the imposition of the IEB, it will then be too late. Sacking the leadership team and handing the school over to the control of an Academy Executive Head will irretrievably alter the character and ethos of the school and rob our children of the chance to be part of a school community we believe in.


If there is any way that you can help to shine light on this situation, then please do. We were informed just over a week ago, and we understand the application for the IEB is being made tomorrow, despite a 1,600 signature petition, a barrage of emails from concerned parents, and a demonstration outside the town hall attended by hundreds of students.


There is a Twitter group @savesedgehill where you can find out more.

I Caught Farage on the train reading 'Lessons in Scapegoating'

"Lessons in Scapegoating"
1. Identify a group of people as the 'other'. Do this by remarking on aspects of their life you can say are 'different' even though you or your family have those aspects too. Useful 'differences' may be such things as what language people speak, clothes they wear or how people stand in the street. Sporting allegiance is useful too. Don't worry about contradictions e.g. that your partner speaks another language, or that you stand about in the street too.


2. These 'other' people must be identified as causing a lowering of people's standards of living. It is vital that the core people with real power in the country are not identified as lowering people's standards of living.

3. Indicate that these 'other' people can be and will be 'removed' in some way or another. Never indicate how they will be removed as past records on this matter are sensitive. When anyone says to you, Are you going to remove these 'other' people, deny it immediately. It doesn't matter either way - the point has been made. People will vote for you because they believe that you will 'get rid' of these 'other' people.

4. Never fill in any detail about how 'removal' of these 'other' people would affect the standard of living of those remaining. Just make vague mentions of 'work permits'. This gives the impression that 'other' people can be reduced to being a 'work permit' and that they can be cut off from partners, parents and children. They can just be hired and then 'sent back'.

5. It's vital to link such things as 'crime' to these 'other people' as if crime was invented by them. Any criminal activity on the part of people in your party or the 'people' (i.e. the not-other people) should be overlooked.

6. It's vital to suggest that the 'people' own the country and that it's been taken away from them by the 'other people'. The fact that the country is owned by a tiny, tiny group of extremely wealthy people should not be mentioned. In fact, the fact that this has always been the case should not be mentioned either. It's vital to keep the idea going that ordinary people 'own' the country and it's been 'taken away' from them by 'other' people who are not the tiny group of extremely wealthy people.

Government says it's keeping down wages; Farage says it's immigrants!

I keep thinking of the young working class bloke (or he said he was) in the audience of Question Time who said that the working class had been hit hardest by immigration. What a terrible success of the lie that his low wages have been caused by immigrants. What's incredible is that he could believe this at a time when it has been explicit - nay, boasted of - information coming from government and everywhere else that they are sacking people and keeping down wages as part of 'austerity'. 

So, in the usual run of things, the government 'freezes' wages (that is, cuts them in real terms) and the private sector uses that as a means to fix the rates too. That's what employers do. It's their 'job' to do that. They're paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to freeze wages. It's what they're doing.


And the bloke in the audience says that he's been hit by immigrants.

I hope a trade union organiser finds him at work on Monday and signs him up.

10 things we learnt about 10-things-we-learnt-about articles in the Guardian

1. Journalists like writing 10-things-we-learnt-about articles.

2. The number 10 is given magical properties by people who write 10-things-we-learnt-about articles.
3. At a time of crisis we have to be constantly directed towards key 'facts' just as people being washed away will hang on to trees and buildings.
4. Sometimes it's good to know-one-thing. Other times it's good to know nothing. Sometimes it's good to try and understand the process rather than the 'thing'. Sometimes, it's good to try and understand how one 'thing' relates to another in a sequence rather than 'things' in a list.
5. That's enough things. I realise this doesn't add up to 10 but if I wrote 10 things I'd be doing the same as the 10-things-we-learnt-about articles...

Caesar Curbs Immigrants in Year Zero

Acting on behalf of Augustus Caesar, I would say that it's become clear to me that migrants from Galilee are bringing down the wages of those in Judea. On these grounds I am instructing the loyal king of Judea to stop all people at the border trying to enter Judea. 

Meanwhile, it may be necessary to reduce the population as it has now been proved that high population causes poverty. The disturbances and riots that will almost certainly ensue will require us - that is, our client monarch, Herod - to reassert our power in the country by the usual means. Divisions between the peoples will enhance our rule. 

We expect to appoint a Governor in the region soon after.

Camilla Cavendish gets grammar schools wrong on Question Time

Camilla Cavendish said on Question Time last night that Grammar Schools were autonomous and disciplined. In my 1950s-60s grammar school there were riots in almost every Chemistry lesson as a consequence of an eccentric teacher who was there for years. The school was broken into one night by some of the boys in my year and they caused quite a lot of damage. I was involved in various milder forms of disruption across two years that was continuous. I'm not proud of the fact but in terms of 'discipline' was in those terms a disaster. The school didn't know how to handle these matters.

Autonomous? County grammar schools came under the aegis of the Local Education Authority. They were no more or less autonomous than the other schools in any given area. It's possible that the prestigious ones could throw their weight around at meetings more than the Secondary Moderns but they weren't 'autonomous'.

There were 'Direct Grant' grammar schools which were forerunners to Academies. These were usually old 'foundation' schools which were funded directly from central government were outside of Local Education Authority control. There were also 'Independent Day Schools' which were private but which accepted some children at 11 (usually) on scholarships. These were independent and even more 'autonomous'.

Beware people on TV talking about the history of education. People tend to make up stuff or just pass on oral legends.

Questions for journalists to ask Osborne and Balls re 'Deficit'

I think we should compile a list of questions for interviewers to ask George Osborne and Ed Balls. At present the questions start off by agreeing that a) there is a deficit b) that it has to be brought down now c) the 'realistic' way of doing it is to cut the public sector - jobs and services.

Alternative questions:

1. Where does the deficit come from?
2. Who or what is responsible for the deficit?
3. Who is saying that the deficit has to be reduced now?
4. Is a 'deficit' in government spending the same as a deficit in, say, my accounts at home? If not, how not?
5. Why do you say that it's people in the public sector and those receiving the benefits of the public sector who have to pay the highest price in paying for this deficit?
6. Who benefits the most from this way of paying it off?
7. Is the mid-term result of this way of doing things that the super-rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer?
8. Do you think that this is a good idea?

Fact or recollection? Or both?

Some of the reviews of my book 'Good Ideas' (John Murray) that are appearing on a certain online bookstore that I won't mention just for the moment are very interesting. They seem to be saying that they hoped for a book of good ideas (fair enough) but have found instead that it's full of 'recollections'.

This raises in my mind the notion that a 'good idea' can't be a 'recollection' and a 'recollection' can't be a good idea. I find this deeply mysterious. Not all, but most of the ideas that I value, cherish and remember have come to me in the context of 'recollections' and/or stories. Or to put it a bit more pompously: narrative is often the best vehicle or transmitter of ideas. In fact, I give the example of a story as told by the former Storytelling Laureate, Taffy Thomas, as a way in which 'ideas' are transmitted through a story.


Perhaps what's going on here, is the rise and rise of the 'empirical'. Or to put it more pessimistically - the Gradgrind education system is inculcating very firmly and indelibly the idea that the only way to get 'facts' (or 'knowledge') is when someone says, 'here comes a fact'. Meanwhile, every day is full of billions of interactions between us where we share knowledge in ways which don't involve us saying, 'Here is a fact'.

Actually, that's one of the points of the book anyway, hah!

Conversations I couldn't have had when I was 15 years old: number 23

Self-pay machines at Waitrose, saying out of synch:
'Tha-tha-nk-nk you-you for for sh-sh - opp-opp ing-ing at-at Wait-wait-rose-rose tha-tha…'
Me: (laughing) I like that…
Till guy: Yeah it's the remix.
Me: Yes, 'Thank You For Shopping at Waitrose - the remix!'
Till guy: Yeahhh….

Wilshaw puts both feet in his mouth...

Breathtaking comments by Head of Ofsted, Michael Wilshaw this morning on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' programme.

Wilshaw says 'autonomy' in the management of schools is a 'good thing'. By this he means Academies and Free schools. The interviewer asks Wilshaw if both Academies and Free schools are performing as badly as Local Authority schools. Yes, says Wilshaw. The interviewer asks Wilshaw why, then, are Academies and Free schools a 'good thing'? Wilshaw 'answers'  this (i.e. he doesn't answer it) by saying that autonomy and freedom is a 'good thing' but the Academies and Free schools need 'monitoring'. They need better monitoring, he says.

At which point, the interviewer could have asked, 'You mean, something like…er….a Local Authority?' 

She didn't. But that's OK. He already sounded like someone who needed close monitoring himself.  

The megaphone explains that we are going to stop poor people being greedy...

The megaphone said:

The deficit is a terrible problem.
The deficit is terrible.
The deficit must stop.

We know how the deficit must stop: 
Poor people have got too much money.
Poor people have too many hospitals.
Poor people have too many schools.
Poor people are getting too much help.

The good news is:
We are going to stop poor people being so greedy.
We are going to stop poor people earning so much.
We are going to stop poor people having so many hospitals.
We are going to stop poor people have so many schools.
We are going to stop poor people getting help.

The good news is:
This is going to make the economy healthy.
The good news is:
It's working.
How do we know it's working?
Because poor people are getting poorer.
and super-rich people are getting richer.

Please join me with celebrating this.
Hip hip hurrah
hip hip hurrah
hip hip hurrah

Inequality, poverty, hunger - blimey, how did they happen?

One of the great achievements of capitalism is to keep the causes of inequality hidden. This is not done by literally hiding it, but by deflecting our view of these causes. It's done in hundreds of different ways, not all of them evil or malign. So, of course it's right and good to raise concern about poverty and hunger but in so doing the attention gets deflected on to charities and, as I mentioned in the previous post, into the fact that supermarkets throw away food. Or again, our attention is constantly directed towards 'great' entrepreneurs and successful business people as if they are in no way connected to low pay. Again, we are led to believe that the cause of low pay is immigration without us being asked to look at government policies designed specifically to bring about low pay, or indeed company board rooms where low pay is fixed by those people who have the power to fix it.


When I listen to radio and TV programmes about poverty and inequality, again and again I come off them thinking that the only thing I've learned is that poverty causes poverty and inequality is caused by inequality!

So, in brief - and it really isn't a mystery - inequality is caused by the very process at the heart of capitalism. If I a capitalist want to make money, I have to spend less of company funds than I get in sales. I can do that by spending very little on rent or buying property - OK but I'll probably end up in a lousy place to produce or distribute. I can do it by spending very little on 'plant'. OK but I'll probably fall behind my competitors. Or I can do it by spending as little as possible on my employees' wages. I can do this by sacking people - but I can only do that if I've got machines to replace them, probably. Or I can do it by paying them as little as I can. To help me do that I've got a government freezing wages in the public sector, and smashing up trade unions and the media keeping up a massive campaign of vilification against anyone who takes action to defend their standard of living.

This central matter of the owners of business keeping wages down in order to make profits is why there is poverty and hunger. End of.

Now, we can think this can be 'reformed' in some way. Or we can think the whole caboodle needs abolishing.

That's for another day…!

Hunger - distracting our attention

Feel pretty sure that some kind of 'deflection' or 'displacement' is going on over this matter of hunger in Britain. I'm hearing a lot of focus on supermarket 'waste'. This waste is not directly to do with the hunger. Only indirectly.

There are two connections we should make with the hunger:



1) The system we live under is unequal. It doesn't pay some people enough to feed themselves.



2. The system we live under produces enough food for everyone but that very system cannot enable everyone to get enough. That's not to do with the fact that supermarkets throw some stuff away after it gets to their shelves. It's to do with the fact that some people can't buy the stuff while it's on the shelves.

New poem: Michael Bublé

I was in the loos at one of the big London stations

and I heard someone singing in the next door

cubicle.

I called out, ‘Hi! It’s Michael Bublé, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Can I just say, that you do that really great.’

‘Thanks,’ he said.

I joined in with him: ‘...you don’t know what

it’s like, to love somebody, to love somebody,

the way I love you...’

‘I saw you on that Christmas special with Dawn

French,’ I said.

‘Oh that!’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ I said, ‘a bit, whoaaa!’

‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘Is she like that in real life?’ I said.

‘Oh yeah, but that’s part of the fun, man.’

‘Look, I don’t want to be rude,’ I said, ‘but..’

‘No you go ahead...’

‘But your dancing...’

‘I knew you’d bring that up,’ he said, ‘everyone

does. It’s OK, I know what you’re going to say...

it looks like I’m just about to fall over. Yeah,

well I am!’

He laughed.

I laughed.

‘And would you mind if I said something about

that ‘you don’t know what it’s like to love

somebody’ track?’ I said.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I’ve got Otis Redding’s version in my head and...’

‘Otis Redding didn’t do it. It was the BeeGees,’ he

said.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

‘Oh I’m sure,’ he said.

‘Well, whoever it was - and it wasn’t Otis?’

‘It wasn’t Otis,’ he said.

‘Well, the thing is, when you do it, I just keep

thinking of - you say, the BeeGees - but whoever

it was...and I’m not really listening to you.’

‘Hey don’t worry about it, man,’ he said, ‘it’s all

music.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s all music. Oh yes and that time you

were...’

But I heard the loo flush, the door opened and shut and

he was gone.

Deficit? What deficit?!

The war against the deficit is presented to us daily as something that must be done, that 'we' have to do. It rests on several assumptions:
1. There is a 'deficit' or what the technical folk call a 'structural deficit'.
2. If it isn't brought down, some kind of economic cataclysm will take place.
3. It's something that 'we' have to do (or it is done to all of 'us').

Let's take these one by one:

1. The more I read about this 'structural deficit' the less it seems to be something actual or real. So, I got to understand the difference (or so I thought) between the 'debt' and the 'deficit' was by comparing them to my mortgage and my bank balance. The 'debt' I thought was like my mortgage - permanent, background buzz of outgoings that I could do nothing about, just fixed and there as part of my penalty for wanting to live in a house that I tell myself I own. Historic and unmovable. The deficit was like my bank balance, going up and down according to my income and my spending.

It now seems that though my bank balance is a concrete fact, the deficit is what economists predict is going to happen if certain things are done by politicians. However, those who predict it are hardly ever right; the size of this deficit may or may not matter as that would depend on 'what comes next' i.e. is the exchequer able to pay off whatever it owed earlier as well as paying interest rates on what it owed as it went along. And again, what is clearly even less predictable than our own personal incomes in my bank balance analogy, is the amount of money the government 'earns' or gets from the taxes we pay, which, as we know, is dependent on how much money employers pay us.

Meanwhile, the main penalty that seems to occur if it is deemed that the structural deficit is too high is that the government has to borrow money at a higher rate. But isn't this all just a matter of bankers and bankers' economists talking to each other about what they predict will happen, rather than what is actually happening? Might it not be just a matter of kidology for some wider ulterior motive…like, for example…an ideological reason to 'cut the welfare state', or what Margaret Thatcher called eradicating socialism?

Even so, it now seems in retrospect that there is no difference between the kinds of running deficits that Tory and Labour governments have had. If anything, Tory running deficits have been higher…and even this one may well turn out to be so too…

This is not what we hear in the press. Nor do we hear the extent to which the 'deficit' as a present ongoing useful concept is bogus. No, we keep hearing e.g. BBC journalists talking about how 'we' have to bring the deficit down.

2. What is the cataclysm if 'we' don't bring it down? It seems, as I have said, that the cataclysm is the potential of bankers making government borrowing more expensive. However, at the same time, the policies in place seem just as capable of bringing about a cataclysm: huge private debt, inflating property prices, low tax returns off low wages…

We are asked to accept a policy of government cuts and wage cuts on the promise that this will avoid the cataclysm even as other policies are in place bringing it about anyway!

3. The big lie in the whole story is that 'austerity' and the present policies are for the benefit of all of us. This lie is told by talking about the health of the 'economy' and quoting numbers of jobs being 'provided'. What is in fact taking place is an ongoing shift of wealth from the poor to the rich. So, if we take the national cake of wealth, a chunk of it can be expressed in terms of 'capital' (that's assets, property, money that is used for lending) and the other that can be expressed in terms of income from earnings or 'wages'/''salaries'. If we look at those chunks of cake over the last 30 years, we can see that the capital chunk has got bigger and the income chunk has got smaller.

'Austerity' was a way of carrying this on, even though 'capital' had blown some of its 'money used for lending'. Austerity is a way of clawing what was blown (or an attempt to do so) back from wage-earners.

Put more starkly, it was and is a way for the rich to stay rich or get richer, while the poor stay poor or get poorer.

Opening Conversations - a reading and talk at Goldsmiths Dec 10

Presented by the Department of English and Comparative Literature in association with the Goldsmiths Writers' Centre:


Michael Rosen (Professor of Children's Literature)

'Opening conversations - writing and beyond writing'

Michael Rosen has been writing for 50 years. Reflecting on this, he thinks it's all been about opening conversations with readers and listeners: children and adults he meets, who write to him and who talk to each other on social media. He will bring different kinds of his writing to this talk and discuss the different conversations they have triggered off - and compare them with the kinds of questions that children and students are asked within education.

10 December, 6pm, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre

To reserve a place, apply to Maria Macdonald, WT 509
E-mail m.macdonald@gold.ac.uk
or telephone 020 7919 7436

Sign

The sign on the train alarm said ' Break cover'.

I looked over my shoulder, checked my bag

and headed out into the crowd.

No one spotted me.

So far so good.

Spotted on a bus

On bus:
Boy: Are you Michael Rosen?
Me: Yes.
Boy: Really?
Me: I am Michael Rosen
Boy: You look just like him.

New poem: Search

My email account has its own search engine.

Any word in any email can be found. This

week I searched for an email I sent about my

children’s first words. The email firm said,

‘Sorry, try again later.’ Later the email firm

said, ‘Sorry, try again later.’ The email is

there but I can’t get at it. I can’t find it or

read it. Fifty years ago I was in hospital. They

tell me I was knocked down. They say, I lay

in a ditch talking,they put me on a table and

waited for the x-ray people to arrive. They

tell me I had my eyes open. They say, I was

talking. I try to remember this. It never comes

up. I don’t know where it is.

New poem: Museums

My mother loved museums. She said that the

Bethnal Green Museum saved her. I didn’t know

what it saved her from. My father swore in

Yiddish. My mother said, ‘Don’t say that!’

I said, ‘What did he say?’

‘It sounds like my uncles in the back room,’ she

said, ‘they were playing gin rummy.’

‘What’s gin rummy?’ I said.

In one museum we went to, she saw a sampler.

A nine year old girl had embroidered it hundreds

of years ago. After that, we could be having tea

and my mother would look up and say, ‘Let self-

sacrifice be its own reward.’

I said, ‘What’s self-sacrifice?’

My father went out the room. We heard him

upstairs.

My mother said, ‘Ask your father what he’s doing

and tell him to stop it.’

There was a typhoid outbreak in south America.

On the news, they said, ‘Don’t eat the corned

beef. The corned beef comes from south America.

Don’t eat the corned beef.’

My mother went to the cupboard. It was stacked

up with corned beef tins. She took one out.

‘Better not open that till the typhoid outbreak’s

over,’ she said.

New poem: Church

My mother said that the night I was born the

church burnt down. I told people: ‘The night

I was born the church burnt down.’ I heard

people say it, ‘The night he was born, the

church burnt down.’ I thought that I did it. I

said, ‘Can we go and see the place where

I was born?’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ my mother

said, ‘why do you keep asking to see the

place where you were born? What do you

think? It wasn’t good enough?’

New poem: Airport

I was in a car to the airport. The couple I was

with had an agreement to help each other get

anxious.

He said, ‘It’s in the bag I’m taking on board.’

She said, ‘It won’t go through security.’

He said, ‘This is the worst airport in the world.’

‘You’re doing it again,’ she said.

‘YOU’RE doing it again,’ he said.

The driver jammed on the brakes.

‘Bloody hell,’ said the husband, ‘that woman’s

got a death wish. Came straight out.’

‘Shush,’ said the woman, ‘you’re not driving.

Drop us off next to the trolleys,’ she added.

‘Drop us off next to the trolleys,’ said the

husband.

‘I’ve told him that,’ she said.

The driver drove past the sign:

‘Terminal set down’.

‘There!’ said the husband, ‘Terminal set down.’

‘I saw it already,’ said the driver.

New poem: Ma

My grandmother left America on a boat for Liverpool

with 3 children she had had there. She left behind

the 2 children she’d had in London. People said

she didn’t say goodbye to them. They were hoeing

in a field, so she waved. One of them she never saw

again. No one knows how she said goodbye to their

father. People said that he told her he’d join her soon.

He never did. When she got back, one of the children

she brought with her, died. I remember her coming

to see us. My father called her ‘Ma’. No one round

our way called their mother, ‘Ma’.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said to me.

She put her hand in her bag. It was a shoe horn, made

of metal, painted red. In winter the red shoe horn

was cold.

New poem: Danger

My father made coffee tables. He went to school furniture

dumps and brought home chemistry laboratory benches.

He turned them into coffee tables by sawing the legs down

so that the bench top was just a few inches off the floor.

He went to junk shops and discovered the marble tops

of old tables that were used in bedrooms as poor people’s

bathrooms. He brought them home, threw away the

wooden base and fixed black square metal legs to the

marble tops. My brother said that they weren’t marble,

they were carboniferous limestone. He identified the fossils

in them. Our father brought back a staffroom table. He

sawed the legs down and hired a floor sander to

sand down the top. He walked up and down the

table top till all the scratches had gone. My mother

said that he made coffee tables so that he could have

somewhere to put his droppings. ‘He never picks anything

up. He only ever puts things down.’ Some days there were

so many coffee tables in the place, it was difficult to get round

the room. When we left home, he gave my brother and me

some of the coffee tables. One time he came over with

a coffee table that he had bought for me. It looked like an

old coffee table but it had only just been made. One of my

children stuck a red sign saying ‘DANGER’ on it.

New poem: House

When I was at university I used to come home

and late evening I’d get into long conversations

with my father. Sometimes these would last

until two or three in the morning until my mum

would bang on the floor and tell us to get to bed.

I remember one time he said that it was down to

us to change the world now. He and his friends

had tried and made mistakes.

‘How’s it going?’ he said.

I said we were doing our best. We have

meetings.

‘And?’ he said.

I said that the meetings were really good and we

weren’t going to make the same mistakes, He

asked me what was it like where I was living and

I said that there were was a gang of us in a house.

‘All students?’ he said.

‘No, there’s a whole load of us who had met

up in the meetings but there’s also a guy who

works on the sites. He’s a gas. He gets dressed up

in his site gear and goes to bed in it. Boots an’ all.

Then in the morning, his alarm rings and he steps

straight out of bed, out the room, down the stairs

and out the house.’

Mum banged on the floor. My dad got up. On the

way out he said, ‘Put the bit about changing the

world on hold.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘this time it’s going to happen.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not till you do something about him

going to work in his sleep.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t get it. He’s having a laugh.

We’re getting there.’

‘Switch the fire off when you turn in,’ he said.

New poem: Buildings

A team from the TV rushed down to a food bank and

asked the people about the deficit. Could they think of

ways of bringing down the deficit?

No, it didn’t seem as if they could.

We have hard choices to make, said the team, should

we cut hospitals or schools or social services? Or should

wages come down?

The people at the food bank said that they would prefer

it if it was none of those things.

You have to choose, said the TV team.

Why now? said one of the people. It wasn’t as bad as

this a few years ago.

It’s pretty complicated said the TV team, but you remember

there was a banking crisis? As a result we’ve got to

get ourselves back in the black.

The thing is, said another one of the people, we haven’t

got any money to do much about that. Why not go and

ask the people with money?

Ah, no, said the TV team, that would be like pulling down

a building in order to keep it up.

Ah well, said one of the people in the line, if you’re talking

about buildings, it’s us who build buildings. Money doesn’t

build buildings.

Sorry, don’t get you, said the people on the TV team, so 

what’s it to be, schools or hospitals?

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.

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,

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.