Race is to the miffed
For all the praise or flak it gets for being a multicultural London borough, some folk seem unable to talk about Hackney’s racial make-up without reaching for a dog whistle and giving it a good, hard blow.
You’ll see what I mean if you take a look at this post of Luke Akehurst’s, which I picked up on over at Dave Hill’s Clapton Pond Blog. In it, Luke is taking a pop at this Spectator article by Anthony Browne, formerly of the Policy Exchange and now Boris Johnson’s Policy Director.
I recommend you read Browne’s article. I fully agree that he talks a lot of bollocks, including nonsense like:
Many on the Left hope so because they believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation — interracial love rather than war.
It’s a cheap shot, and it certainly doesn’t - in my opinion - reflect the views of most people on the Left. You could certainly argue that Browne is puffing on the dog whistle himself, but for a different audience. But, insofar as I can see, the rest of his argument boils down to:
1) The modern trend towards diversity is a Western phenomenon.
2) People tend to gravitate towards others who have the same language, culture and values.
3) As poorer economies prosper, fewer people leave for richer countries in search of prosperity; and, indeed, many people start to return to their homelands.
4) The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.
I agree with the first three points (Poland and migrant Poles would be a good, up-to-date example of them), even if I have major reservations about the fourth. I also think Browne has a rather distorted idea about what Hackney is actually like, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.
Up to this point, I suspect Cllr Akehurst and I are mostly in agreement. As he says:
One of the things that is right about my borough though, and really works, is that it functions pretty well as a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community. People live along side [sic] each other in relative peace and harmony and on the whole they appreciate and enjoy this diversity.
He’s right. We do live alongside each other in relative peace and harmony (though it’s far from perfect), and - on the whole - people are pretty tolerant of each other. However, I don’t think Hackney really works well as “a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community” - what it does do, though, is show that a fairly large number of communities can co-exist in the same administrative area, live mostly separate lives, and rub along well where they have to or want to. But to imply, as Luke does, that Hackney is a single, multicultural community does not reflect the reality.
I’d be happy to disagree, and leave it at that. But Luke made my jaw drop by failing to actually address Browne’s argument, instead listing these quotes from the latter’s article:
“Many on the Left … believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation” (I’ve never heard anyone on the left say this!
“The champions of diversity ultimately believe that our future is not as a species with many races, but with one race — a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a quarter African and a quarter European.”
“The eternal human urge for self-segregation — surrounding yourself with people like you — is likely to triumph over the more ephemeral economic and political incentives to leave what you know.”
“It is not Hackney that is the future of the world, but Japan.”
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
“The white flight — or white self-segregation — which is such a feature of US cities is now endemic in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of white Briton’s (sic) fleeing the effects of the government’s open border policy on London each year.”
“The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.”
All of which, selected with the true skill of the dog-whistler, are designed to spark fear and worry amongst minority groups - and others - who might not have read some of the following from the same article:
“…I have been convinced that mixed-race people, by a blessing of nature, combine the best of all their parts.”
“And as our minorities keep telling us, it is not easy being a minority, since in democracies it is the majority that sets the rules.”
“Self-segregation is apparent all around us, but there is a reluctance to accept it because it mocks multiculturalism”.
In a tour de force of doublethink, though, Luke does accept the self-segregation that’s all around us. Why else would he go on to say this?
Do Hackney’s Tory Councillors, eight out of nine of whom are from minority faith and ethnic communities, know about the views of their London Mayor’s Policy Director about the model of community harmony represented by our borough?
What? Does Cllr Akehurst really believe that all those Orthodox Jewish councillors (for that, at root is what he’s talking about) are going to get upset that someone has said this in print?
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
It’s all these things that have made the Chareidi so strong a community in Hackney. You could say the same, to a greater or lesser degree, of other faith and ethnic groups in Hackney: the Turks and Kurds who live in the north of Dalston and south of Stoke Newington; the Vietnamese in Shoreditch; the Africans and Caribbeans in Dalston. You could even make the same point about the enclaves of the (mostly white) middle-class people who are centred on Stoke Newington Church Street or in the leafy, spacious streets and squares of De Beauvoir.
And this brings me back to the point on which I disagree with both Anthony Browne and Luke Akehurst. Browne concluded his article by saying:
The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. Not all the world will look like Hackney, just those countries that opened their borders when push-migration was at its peak.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, ‘the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities.’
What Browne doesn’t realise he is saying is that, if there’s a worldwide trend towards less diversity within nations, the global picture will look more like Hackney: a place in which people band together mostly with those who have the same “language, culture and values“, but still have to find ways of getting along together with others as groups and as individuals.
That’s Hackney’s strength. And I like it: except when people on both left and right exploit the weaker relationships between those communities for political gain.
Published on 3rd August, 2008
Manor Road Memorial
At the junction of Manor Road and Stamford Hill. I think it must be a memorial to Lucinda Ferrier, who was killed in an accident on 23rd July.
UPDATE: A reader called Stuart writes: “Lucinda died on June 23rd, after an accident with a HGV on the opposite side of the A10, travelling South. Luci survived for nearly four hours after the accident. The bicycle is a ghost bike placed by members of www.londonfgss.com.”
Also note I have corrected the date.
Published on 2nd August, 2008
Pillar of the Community
And I thought I was just a feckless eejit.
Not so. ITV says I’m a Pillar of the Community. Look. Twice.
Just as well they didn’t see me in the Cat & Mutton last night. I was an unashamed disgrace. Best time I’d had for ages.
Anyway, that’s quite enough autofellatio. It’s Elegantly Dressed Wednesday after all, and here’s a stylish pic of Alexander Trocchi, the thinking Glaswegian’s favourite skag-addled writer.
Published on 30th July, 2008
25 years of the “urban jungle”
It’s a rare article about Hackney that makes me want to stand up and give the writer a standing ovation, but that’s pretty much what I did when I read this:
Hackney needs activists, not socialist revolutionaries (whom Mr Harrison rightly says adore picking at sores) and theorists, not just the very necessary agencies to make claimants more efficient at their sad profession. It needs busybodies, preferably among the deprived themselves.
It reminded me of something I wrote on my old blog in December last year, when I was making a faltering, contorted case for localism in the face of a indifferent, one-size-fits-all council:
If we can’t get our representatives to listen, we need to get angry on other people’s behalf as well as our own. Because if we don’t, we’re not just going to get rancid public toilets, we’re not going to get respite care for the people who need it, or make sure that members of our community don’t have to sleep rough because the council has failed them. And if we can’t do any of those things, how do we really imagine we’re going to improve life on those gang-ridden estates?
But whilst I was blogging towards the end of 2007, the first writer was making his case in The Times as long ago as 7th December 1983. The journalist was Richard North and you can find his article in the newspaper’s archive. It must have caused a stir because, as many as twelve years later, he mentioned the same article in an Independent piece:
I can remember, even in palmier days, I was excoriated by liberal types for writing in the Times that Hackney’s public spaces were in need of busybodies - middle class or not - who could assert that swiping little Jewish children wasn’t on.
Few would disagree with that; although I suspect that what he originally said would cause a stir, particularly now:
…the burly little goys in Clissold Park need to be cuffed and talked to when they insult the pale Hasidic families who go there on Sundays.
I don’t advocate cuffing anyone, but I certainly advocate putting the fear of damnation up any child who does that. Certainly, these days, it’s relatively rare to see a Orthodox Jewish family walking in that park, even though a large number of them live on or near its north eastern edge. It’s not the only depressing vision conjured up by North’s article. Indeed, a heavy sense of plus ça change weighs you down further with each paragraph. Any Hackney resident of today will soon spot these 25-year-old remarks are at least as relevant now as they were then.
Hackney is a place in which the vast majority of adults dare not speak to children, even when the children are inarticulately crying out to talk. The adult seems not to dare speak to the teenager, even though I have always found the glue sniffers, and even the illicit parker, glad to be spoken to.
And:
…beyond cruel petty officials and being broke, what most assails the hopeless minority in Hackney is our modern society in which only competence makes life manageable.
I am, of course, being highly selective. Some of North’s suggestions, and particularly his solutions, betray a tendency to wish his own pet ideas on other people’s difficulties. This one’s a gem:
The unemployed… need to boycott the canned drinks makers and the pubs and start brewing their own wine.
Home brewed wine? He clearly hasn’t tasted the stuff, even if it is a cut above Carlsberg Special Brew. Or how about this tour de force?
For many hopeless people… Permissiveness has broken their immediate family. Increasingly mobility has broken their wider world, robbing them of relatives. Planners have broken their communities. Teachers and welfare workers have robbed them of responsibility. The liberal creed has broken their will to self discipline.
So, on the one hand it’s not their fault but, on the other:
I have to accept that Hackney’s misery is in part the fault of its inhabitants, and in part of people like me who won’t do more about chivvying and informing them.
People like him? Yes, the middle class, or rather more gobsmackingly:
What a double pity that those who have always been good at poverty - the drop-out middle class, who go hippy at the drop of a hat - never taught the working class how to do it.
It’s the same old flaw: a middle class person comes to the conclusion that, despite the terrible state society is in, the poor could do more to help themselves and each other; but then can’t accept it could be done without middle-class involvement and - preferably - leadership. All whilst pointing out that (middle class) liberals knackered society in the first place.
It’s hardly any surprise, therefore, that liberals tend dismiss all elements of the argument as bollocks. Take a look over at Dave Hill’s London blog: it’s still going on today. Well-off liberal Dave has got rather froth-flecked by new City Hall Policy Director Anthony Browne in general, and about this Daily Mail article in particular. Fair play. Especially when confronted by this bit of circular logic:
If people don’t learn the difference between right and wrong, it is not just that they become anti-social. They don’t learn the fundamental lesson that there is only one person responsible for what they do — and that is themselves. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is anyone’s fault; it is always someone else’s. Don’t blame me for what I do; it’s society’s fault.
The logic as I read it is:
1) Some people haven’t been taught the difference between right and wrong.
2) They therefore have no idea that they are responsible for their own actions.
3) Even though they don’t know they are responsible for their own actions, it is wrong of them to blame other people. Including those people in society who didn’t teach them the difference between right and wrong.
And the people responsible for this moral vacuum? Yep, middle-class liberals:
This Left-wing moral neutrality comes from the best of intentions — wanting to sympathise with victims and other vulnerable people. If they do something anti-social, it is because anti-social things have been done to them — they are not at fault. And if you can’t judge someone for their actions, there can’t really be a right or wrong thing to do.
As I said earlier: plus ça bloody change. Theorists are theorists, whether they’re socialist or patrician Tory. And as Richard North rightly pointed out, Hackney needs fewer of them - even if he was, to a degree, one himself.
Sadly, in amongst all the moralistic finger pointing, the fact remains that - after 25 years - Hackney residents (and many other) are even more terrified of speaking to children, teenagers or - often - other adults. Which is a shame because, whoever you blame, it’s not government, or theorists, or socialist revolutionaries who have the power to solve the problem - it’s us.
If we dare.
Published on 29th July, 2008
Take-away Feud in Hackney
I love a good feud, and there’s the makings of a really ripe one in this week’s Hackney Gazette. In the editorial, Gazette Opinion, one of our friendly, neighbourhood hacks is taking a pop at the local blogosphere.
SOME bloggers can be remarkably precious about their weblogs considering many are the web equivalent of the nutty tub-thumpers at Speakers’ Corner.
I can’t say I’m precious about mine, but the nutty tub-thumper bit is spot on. Give me a tub I like and I’ll thump merrily along. Anyway, pushing on:
Don’t believe all the sanctimonious drivel about citizen journalism. Most blogs are little more than a self-indulgent soapbox for those arrogant and egotistical enough to believe their opinions and observations deserve a public airing.
Occasionally, a blog will spark controversy and come to the attention of the media via computer search engine alerts.
It’s accepted practice - particularly if a public figure makes controversial remarks on a blog - for newspapers to use them as source material for a follow-up story, subject to the paper contacting the person quoted to check that what appeared is accurate.
For bloggers to moan that what they themselves put in the public domain has somehow been pillaged because a newspaper hasn’t acknowledged them smacks of breath-taking petulance.
Miaow! Who on earth can the Gazette be thinking of? Maybe Dave Hill knows…
(ps - a free story for Hackney Gazette hacks: if your search engine alert has led you thus far, you might want to note that Cllr Akehurst has now come out in favour of extraordinary rendition and as a supporter of imprisoning people without charge in the appalling conditions at Guantanamo Bay. If he ever becomes Hackney Council’s Cabinet Advisor on Crime and Community Safety, we’re going to be even more fucked than we are already).
Published on 4th July, 2008
Bloody good idea
Even if it’s bound to go wrong. Solace here for one who is too busy and grumpy to blog properly at the moment (ie me).
Published on 3rd July, 2008
Nando’s Campaign Gets Ugly
A while back I touched a bit of a raw nerve when I argued that a group of local campaigners, determined to stop a Nando’s chicken restaurant opening on Stoke Newington Church Street, had an unspoken motive for their action:
The campaigners are trying to find reasons to stop people they despise from spending time in a street they’ve claimed for themselves.
It’s a motive that anti-Nando’s campaigners have denied, but far from being the only one who believes many of these people simply want to preserve (as far as possible) Church Street as a playground for a certain middle-class clique, David T over at Harry’s Place put the argument equally bluntly:
In fact, all sorts of people eat at Nandos. Rich, poor, gourmets, snackers. And I’ll be one of them.
I reckon that the horror that Nandos represents to the “latte sippers”, is that it will attract people like us to Church Street.
Anyway, someone out there is desperate to prove us right. Last night a commenter calling himself (or herself) Mr S.Hitchchicken left this comment:
IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO LIVE IN STOKE NEWINGTON THEN FUCK OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE - YOU CUNTS MAKE ME PUKE JUST LIKE THE NANDOS CHICKEN..WATCH OUT BEN COS WE’RE WATCHING YOU!
It was quickly followed by an email:
You’re not welcome in Hackney..go away and disappear
All of which rather goes to prove my point. The anti-Nando’s campaign is less about stopping a chain store from opening its doors, and more about keeping peasants out of a middle class ‘village’.
It just suggests I’m right when someone starts threatening me for exposing their pathetic prejudices.
Published on 28th June, 2008
Luke Akehurst’s Sick Mind
I first met councillor Luke Akehurst the other week. We met for coffee in Leather Lane, and we spent a very pleasant hour talking about Hackney, its people and its politics. I enjoyed it. He seemed a nice guy.
I was astonished, then, to read this disgusting, sick, vile and idiotic statement on his blog:
Maybe instead of Labour fielding a candidate in Haltemprice & Howden we should find a Martin Bell type candidate - preferably a recently retired senior police officer, or a survivor or relative of a victim of a terrorist attack, to run under the following 5 word candidate description: “Independent - for detaining terrorism suspects”.
I can’t believe how repulsive and politically stupid Luke’s suggestion is. Nor am I alone. Nation of Shopkeepers sums up my feelings perfectly:
Did he really mean that? Did he really mean that they should dig out a mother of someone blown to bits by terrorists and plaster her face all over an obnoxious ‘dog whistle’, knuckle dragging authoritarian campaign? The answer, unfortunately for his children, is yes, he did.
So does Rachel, who survived the terrorist bombings in London.
I expect terrorists to attack our freedoms and our democracy by using fear and terror to hurt us. I was right there, seven feet away from a 19 year old suicide bomber in my carriage on 7/7 and lucky to escape with my life when he killed 26 fellow passengers.
I object vehemently to your assumption that victims of terrorism can be waved about to us as a bloodied figleaf to cover up a naked desire to be seen to be tough on terror for entirely politcal purposes, I object to being used as a political football, and if ‘for the victims’ is going to be invoked for this kind of liberty-trashing fearmongering, then this ‘victim’ (hate that word)is going to shout right back that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Akehurst, your opinions are disgraceful. You do not deserve to win the parliamentary seat you crave, and I hope the voters in Chatham Ward give you a good kicking when they next go to the polls. I am personally going to canvass against you and make sure every single voter knows what appalling views you hold.
Published on 15th June, 2008
Nando’s Revisited
This week’s Hackney Gazette quotes this blog post and reports me saying of the local drive to boycott Nando’s on Stoke Newington Church Street:
“The campaign isn’t about banishing chains - the street has enough of those… It’s not about protecting independent businesses - Nando’s isn’t in competition with them. It’s about keeping Church Steet exclusive, expensive, homogenous and middle class. And an area with a very high average house price.”
Naturally, this has infuriated some. But I was delighted to discover that, in the NO! to Nandos on Church Street group, I’m not far wrong. Try this for size:
Couldn’t be much clearer if he just wrote “Peasants Out”.
This is the same guy who said elsewhere that “You wouldn’t get a fantastic pub like the Shakespeare in Primrose Hill”.
Well, no. I suppose not. But he would get a fantastic little pub like the Shakespeare if he visited some of the others that seem to have the same format, and presumably belong to the same chain - the Approach in Bethnal Green; The Rosemary Branch in De Beauvoir/Hoxton; the Prince George in Dalston; The Royal Inn on the Park, Victoria Park; and so on.
So that’s nice and clear. Chains are fine in N16, as long as they’re the chains middle class people want.
Thankfully I’m not alone in thinking this pathetic.
Chicken wing, anyone?
Published on 13th June, 2008
Translation please?
I write and edit words for a living; but if any client sent me this, I’d ditch them:
This is your chance to contribute to the effective regeneration of major opportunity sites. You will mange [sic] the development control functions for major planning applications and appeals, ensuring the service facilitates high quality development solutions that address the issues of sustainable communities. The ability to engage with our diverse community and build positive and productive relationships to ensure high quality outcomes, and secure community benefits will be essential. In addition, you will have comprehensive knowledge of planning and regeneration gained through extensive planning management experience.
Apart from being unintelligible, there’s no spark of humanity in this at all. You’d never guess it was an advert to recruit someone with power over the environment in which we live and work.
Actually, I take that back. It’s all to easy to guess that it is.
Sadly, it’s an advert for one of the most difficult jobs in the world: Major Applications and Appeals Manager in Hackney’s new “Regeneration and Planning Division”.
Anyway, if you live locally, watch out. Pretty soon there’s going to be someone on £50k per year trying to “engage” with you. And remember - if they ask you to get into their “high quality outcome”, just say no and walk quickly away.
Published on 10th June, 2008