Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

Banning the Muslim veil to protect Western values

On 29 November, the lower house of the Dutch Parliament voted for a partial ban on the burka, the full-face covering veil worn by a minority of Muslim women. If the vote is confirmed by the upper house, the veil will be banned on public transport, in government buildings and in schools.

On 6 December, Angela Merkel, preparing her run for a fourth term as German Chancellor, told the conference of her party, the Christian Democrats, that she too favoured a partial ban.

“The full veil must be banned,” she declared, “wherever legally possible. Showing your face is part of our way of life. Our laws take precedence over honour codes, tribal customs and sharia.”

Angela Merkel at the CDU Conference

Holland used to enjoy a reputation as one of the most liberal countries on earth and, despite the irruption on the scene of a number of hard right-wing parties and individuals – none more so than Geert Wilders, now leading in opinion polls – it retains much of the structure of a highly liberal nation. Merkel has also emerged in the last few years as one of Europe’s most liberal leaders, most notably with her decision to allow a million refugees to enter the country – a decision, incidentally, which she now says will never be repeated.

France and Belgium have already banned the burka and even the niqab, the form of veil which leaves the eyes exposed. Such veils are, it seems, deeply disturbing to Western societies. We are used to seeing faces (part of our way of life, as Merkel says). A covered face is hostile or even sinister, marking the criminal covering his features to avoid identification and capture. During the Northern Ireland troubles, an icon on both sides was the man in the balaclava, the clothing of choice of killers in either camp. 

Faces hidden from sight make us uncomfortable. Discomfort is never easy to bear. It seems that even liberalism finds it difficult to withstand. The developments in Holland and Germany suggest it has a fatal tendency to give way when made uncomfortable. 

That, however, leads to the heart of the Muslim veil conundrum. If liberalism backs down as soon as it’s faced with a perturbing difficulty, what is liberalism worth? Or, putting it another way, it’s easy to tolerate things we’re comfortable with; it’s when we deal with things that make us uncomfortable that our tolerance is truly tested and we have to prove whether it’s genuine or not.

These matters all became personal to me a few weeks ago at a badminton club where we play most weeks. A new, beginner joined. And she came in a niquab.

She’s covered head to foot. Her sleeves are held in place by loops over her thumbs. Her leggings reach down to her shoes. Her only exposed flesh is on her hands and a strip around her eyes. 

Playing badminton with someone dressed that way was certainly a new experience. I suppose it initially felt odd. But it quickly became commonplace. We were all struck by her speed around the court, by her accuracy, by the strength in her wrists. She plays a great deal better than most people who’ve played as little as she has.

When we shake hands at the end of a game, as is the convention, she won’t shake mine or that of any other male player. So what? She smiles (a smile with the eyes is far more telling than one just with the lips). She repeats the usual compliments we all give each other – “good game”, “well played” (the latter always with the subtext, “not quite well enough for us”).

She is, in fact, one of us. If we feel uncomfortable about her dress, what gives us the right to inflict our feelings on her? Her dress codes does us no harm, and it doesn’t hold back her game. What on earth business is it of ours?

I’d go a step further. If we imposed a Muslim veil ban in Britain, she would no longer feel she could come out and join us. She’d be forced to stay at home and give up on a form of exercise which must do her good and which she evidently enjoys. While she’s with us, incidentally, her husband’s looking after the children. That’s a form of equality between the sexes that we, in the West, generally criticise Islam for not displaying enough.

In fact, banning the veil far from integrating our friend more closely into Western society and into an adoption of its values, would hold back her assimilation. In other words, it would produce precisely the opposite effect of what we claim to seek. I fully understand the need, for security reasons, to be able to demand that burka-clad people show their faces to suitably empowered authorities such as the police; I see no reason why Muslims should be forced to abandon the veil generally in public.

One right no constitution in any country guarantees, is the right not to be made uncomfortable. If learning to overcome some slight discomfort in ourselves protects important rights in others, and helps to assimilate different communities better into our society, why shouldn’t we make that effort?

It’s my feeling, and I have personal experience to back it up, that a Muslim veil ban would be a completely unnecessary, illiberal and intolerant measure that would undermine, rather than upholding, Western values.

Drive people to despair and they do desperate things

Many of those US blue-collar workers, the natural constituency of the Democratic Party, who voted for Trump were driven by anger and frustration. Many find that even holding down two or three jobs, they still can’t make ends meet. Feeling let down by the system as it is, and feeling that the leaders they previously trusted are simply part of that same system, they turned to a more radical alternative.

In Britain, seven million people are now in precarious employment. They are in jobs in which they have no guaranteed hours, but they still have to make themselves available, with no assurance that they will be given anything to do or any pay for doing it. Others are given workloads that are all but impossible to clear, or require multiple hours of unpaid overtime to finish. It’s become easy and the norm for companies that hit any kind of financial problem to shed staff, so executives who have failed to achieve their own, often deeply unrealistic targets, can make others take the fall for their poor decisions.

We haven’t yet had a Trump in Britain. What we have had, however, is nearly seven years of government by the Conservative Party, alone (now) or as the dominant partner in a coalition (up to 2015). In its early days, it liked to claim that “we’re all in this together”. Now, under new management, the government claims to want to assist the “just about managing” or “JAMs”, the very people driven to desperation in the States, the ones who have to swim with all their strength to keep their noses just below water.

A new study shows, however, that without a major change of course, life for the JAMs is likely to get harder to the tune of £2500 a year less income by 2020. For all the pledges, desperation is set to increase for the already desperate.

If that kind of despair gave us Trump in the States, it’s likely to have as damaging an effect in Britain too. Or in France, where Le Pen lies in wait, or the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders is the likely beneficiary, or in a host of other countries where the far right is building a head of steam.

As American voters will discover over the next four years, the sad truth is that the leaders who come up with the simple answers – “get out of the European Union”, “drain the swamp”, “build a wall” – only make matters far worse for the very group that puts them in power.

What’s the alternative?

It has to be a leadership as radical and inspiring as Trump’s, but genuinely committed and not merely committed in words, to addressing the problems of those who are suffering such hardship today – and far worse hardship tomorrow. Unfortunately, in most countries those who should be providing that kind of leadership seem, like Hillary Clinton, to be tied to the system that creates the problem and unable to inspire confidence in those they ought to be representing.

The Democrats in the US are facing a particularly toxic Republican in the White House, whose party controls both Houses of Congress and will entrench a majority that shares its views in the Supreme Court.

The Socialist Party in France has led a failed government and is now expected to go down to comprehensive defeat in elections next year.

In Britain, the unions inflicted on the Labour Party a leader, Ed Miliband, who was likeable and intelligent, but could never convince voters that he could be Prime Minister. Now a majority of Labour’s membership has elected Jeremy Corbyn, not once but twice. He too seems likeable and intelligent; he certainly has a radical message but seems not to be getting it through to anything like sufficient numbers: Labour is languishing ten to fourteen points behind the Conservative Party, far too wide a margin to be attributed to the simple and now notorious inability of polling organisations to achieve accuracy.

Homelessness, on the rise in Britain, as is the use of food banks

Worse off by £2500 a year, by 2020. That represents around 10% of the median income in Britain today. A drop of that scale will drive up homelessness, hunger and disease among people who are already struggling. That is the price being paid by those least able to pay any price at all.

And it’s the price of Labour’s failure to win traction in the electorate. It underlines the urgency of addressing that problem today. For a lot of people, not just in Britain but across the developed world, tomorrow may be far worse.

As the election of Trump demonstrates.

Eastern food in a Western dish

I’m very grateful to Bob Patterson, a good friend though we’ve only ever met on line, for pointing out that the latest New Yorker contains an article focused on Luton, where I live. It’s not often that so august a journal turns its attention to this humble town (to be honest, it isn’t that common that it catches the eye even of far less worthy publications, such as the Sun or the Times). And when the prestigious journal is transatlantic, well the least I can do is take a look.

As it happens, the article – England, their England by Lauren Collins – is less about Luton than about the movement it spawned, the English Defence League, and the Moslem community of the town against which the EDL first directed its wrath. It also mentioned one of the more shameful acts of our present Prime Minister, who really does little quite as well as shamelessness, when he denounced multiculturalism at a speech he gave to a conference in Munich last February. He probably thought this was a bit of a vote-winner and a great way of aligning himself with the increasing Islamophobia around Europe, sparking minaret or Burka bans.

In what Collins rightly calls an ‘unseemly coincidence’, Cameron gave his speech just when the EDL was preparing to march through Luton, precisely to denounce multiculturalism.

Having seen some EDL members on a train to Luton, it’s not clear to me that they’re ready to grasp multiculturalism. I can understand why they’d be keen on mono-culturalism – it didn’t strike me that they had learned to cope with even that much – in fact the only culture they seemed to have any affinity to would be the kind you might find adorning a Petri dish in a lab somewhere. This lot took up a lot of space on the train, metaphorically but also physically. They had also taken steps to keep the level of blood in their alcohol streams within reasonable bounds, and they expressed themselves in a language of astonishing richness – every third word or so seemed to be concerned with procreation or bodily waste.

At first glance, it’s a little difficult to understand the bad press that multiculturalism has been getting all round Europe recently. After all, its basic proposition is that people of different faiths or races should be able to get on with each other without either forcing any of them to change fundamentally or spilling any of each other’s blood. I can’t quite see why that shouldn’t be rather a good thing. Being against it feels a bit like telling a new beauty queen that ‘actually, world peace isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

In any case, since last Friday in Norway it feels as though it’s Geert Wilders in Holland, Nicolas Sarkozy in France and, yes, David Cameron in England who need to do a bit of explaining. Anders Breivik has shown just how far you can go when you start getting really passionate about your opposition to multiculturalism. Not that any of those politicians would back the action he took – but they might like to reflect on whether their stance doesn’t give some kind of endorsement to the views he holds and encourages those who share their more extreme forms.

Where anti-multiculturalism can take us

As for me, well I’m just going to stick with my attachment to multiculturalism.

To me, multiculturalism is the woman I saw in London the other day, in black Moslem dress from head to – well, actually not quite to toe. The dress stopped just above the ankles so we could all admire the elegant pale blue leather and cork creations she was wearing on her feet, with their three inch heels. The Islamic extremist would denounce her for the display of flesh and fashion, the EDL for the headscarf. The multiculturalist just smiles at the contradictions.

To me, multiculturalism is the cricket team that occupies the best ground in Luton – ‘Luton Town and Indians’. ‘Indians’? Most of the ‘Indians’ in Luton actually have their roots in Pakistan. Did they play for the old ‘Luton Indians’ club? And some years ago it merged with Luton Town. For her article, Lauren Collins interviewed Abdul Kadeer Baksh, who leads the Luton Islamic Centre’s vigorous campaign against Moslem extremism. Responding to the EDL’s taunts he told her, ‘when they say we don’t integrate, they mean we don’t assimilate.’ Well, quite – and why should they assimilate? Surely I can cope with not being the same as my neighbour? To be honest, I’ve had neighbours I’d hate to resemble, but that doesn’t stop me living next door to them. ‘Luton Town and Indians’ – in that preservation of both names, don’t we have a wonderful illustration of integrations without assimilation?

And finally, to me multiculturalism is my wife going into a butcher’s in Bury Park, the ‘Indian’ area, to buy halal chicken last week. The butcher’s astonished response was ‘Why?’ And Danielle had the best possible answer: ‘because we have friends from Pakistan coming round for a meal.’ The friends wanted a typical European dish, so Danielle roasted chicken for them (though by its quality it was nothing like typical). Western cooking for Moslem friends required halal meat.

You know, Cameron, it wasn’t that hard. It didn’t require us to compromise any principles. And we all had a great time.

Remind me – just what is it that you, Wilders, Sarkozy – and Breivik – have against multiculturalism?