Category Archives: UK

UAF conference this Saturday

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UAF conference 2007Unite Against Fascism National Conference
17 February 2007 9.30am-5pm
TUC Conference Centre, Great Russell Street, London WC1
Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road

The British National Party (BNP) is receiving the highest levels of support for a fascist party in British history. In recent years its vote has increased in a context of rising racism, Islamophobia and attacks on multiculturalism. At the 2006 local elections it polled over 238,000 votes compared to 3,000 votes in 2000, and now has a record 49 local councillors.

The BNP is a fascist organisation. As history shows, fascism stands for the total annihilation of whole communities, freedoms and democratic rights.

In 2007 the BNP will be targeting the local elections in England and Wales and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

Active campaigning can stop the BNP. In the 1930s the Jewish and Irish communities, trade unions and others defeated the fascist Blackshirts at Cable Street, and in the 1970s the National Front was defeated by mass anti-Nazi campaigns. More recently the BNP was defeated in Millwall and Oldham. Learning lessons from these campaigns is crucial.

Unite Against Fascism is organising this national conference to look at the impact of increasing BNP support, to discuss strategies that have been successful in stopping the BNP and to bring together the broad opposition that is needed to halt the rise of fascism including from trade unions, Muslim, Jewish and other faith communities, black, Asian, lesbian, gay and disabled communities and students.

Further details on UAF website.

Clareification controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We’ve been remiss in not posting on the Clare College controversy, involving the publication of anti-religious caricatures – including one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons – in the student magazine Clareification.

In a typically stupid open letter to Clare College, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society argues that anti-Muslim caricatures can’t be racist because, don’t you see, Muslims are not a race: “We would like to remind all concerned that satirising religion – even if that religion is Islam – is not racism, as this episode has been dubbed. Religion and race have very different characteristics.”

So, according to Sanderson’s warped reasoning, the most vicious Islamophobic propaganda produced by the BNP can’t possibly be racist because it is directed against adherents of a religion – which is, of course, precisely the argument that the fascists themselves use.

See local press coverage here and national coverage here. A correspondent points out that the editor of the magazine is “in hiding without a single threat having being made”.

For a comment on the Clareification controversy, which concedes that the magazine contained “the most vile and unambiguous Islamophobia”, see Constitutional Lore, 13 February 2007

Bedworth by-election result

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islam a threat to us allThe BNP came second in a council by-election in Bedworth, Warwickshire, last week. This disturbing result demonstrates how the climate of racism and anti-Muslim hysteria is playing into the hands of the Nazis.

Labour held on to its seat in Bede ward on Thursday of last week, polling 658 votes, but the BNP’s Alwyn Deacon, a pub landlord from Nuneaton, took 546 votes. The Tory vote fell to 301, less than two fifths of its previous vote in the ward.

In recent council elections voters in Bede have been faced with a choice of just Labour or Tory candidates. The by-election saw a wider field of candidates, with the Liberal Democrats standing and winning 119 votes.

The efforts of anti-fascists to hold back the BNP were not helped by a leaflet put out locally by the Searchlight organisation. These echoed Tory leader David Cameron’s recent remarks, equating the BNP to “Islamic extremism”.

Socialist Worker, 14 February 2007

Iain Dale discovers media double standards over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A post yesterday on Iain Dale’s Diary reveals that the eponymous Tory blogger has belatedly woken up to the double standards practised by the media in connection with the Robert Cottage trial. He writes:

“Last October the police raided two peoples’ homes in Pendle and uncovered explosives, rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit. A former British National Party member, Robert Cottage, who stood in last year’s local elections in Colne has now subsequently been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country.

“Maybe I have missed the story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.”

Iain Dale’s Diary, 13 February 2007

Perhaps Dale should consider raising this issue with his own party. The heavily publicised report Uniting the Country (pdf here), prepared by the Conservative Policy Group on National and International Security under Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, dismisses talk of media double standards over the Robert Cottage case as a product of Muslims’ victim mentality. The authors complain (p.11) that Muslim perceptions of discrimination have created:

“an environment in which distortion also finds ready, if unwitting, acceptance. The Group was told a story in two widely separated towns of the alleged suppression by mainstream media, on anti Islamic grounds, of the discovery of a BNP chemical weapons factory. This had been manufactured from four separate reports over the space of a month in different local newspapers. The story began with a report of a BNP member being charged with possession ‘of chemical components which could be used to make explosives’. It ended, despite there being no new facts, with the claim of the discovery of ‘chemical weapons’.”

A green light to shoot the innocent

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A green light to shootThe families caught up in the Forest Gate terror raids attacked an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report as a “whitewash” on Tuesday after it said that officers would not be disciplined.

The police watchdog criticised Scotland Yard’s handling of the raids in east London last June and urged the Met to apologise publicly for its “very aggressive” tactics. But the IPCC claimed that the police had been justified in carrying out the raids and that officers would not be disciplined.

The families, in a statement issued through their lawyers, said that they had been the victims of a “crime of the utmost seriousness” and had been denied justice because of the failure to investigate that crime.

Mohammed Abdul Kahar, one of two brothers arrested in the raids, attacked the report as a “whitewash.” Mr Kahar, who was shot during the raids, said that the report gave a “green light” to police to conduct anti-terror operations the way that they wanted.

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The abuse of research

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As political parties set out their stalls of new ideas in preparation for a general election, the increasing influence of privately funded research on political discussion will demand closer scrutiny. Private thinktanks are increasingly shaping national debates in the media, something made possible through the private funds required for high-profile launches, websites and email campaigns.

A striking example of this symbiotic relationship is Policy Exchange’s report Living Apart Together, on Muslim social attitudes, which is officially launched today. It was released to the press two weeks ago to provide research cover for David Cameron’s speech attacking multiculturalism and prominent Muslim organisations. The report included claims that a significant minority of Muslims were “living apart” from British society, claims that were widely reported in the media and appeared to legitimise Conservative party rhetoric.

Yet few reports made clear that Policy Exchange has an explicit political agenda. Michael Gove, the Conservative MP and author of the book Celsius 7/7 – How the West’s Policy of Appeasement Has Provoked Fundamentalist Terror and What Has to Be Done Now, is a founding chairman of Policy Exchange. And he has made it clear that thinktanks are crucial for the next general election campaign, stating that “a precursor to electoral victory is victory in the battle of ideas and the battle for the agenda”.

The politicisation of research can lead to serious distortions in debates on policy issues. Debates about multiculturalism, security and British Muslims are bound to have a central place in the next election.

Marie Smyth and Jeroen Gunning report in the Guardian, 13 February 2007

‘Swim centre bars two-year-old girl because she isn’t Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thus the headline to yet another scaremongering article in today’s Daily Mail. Read it, and you find that the actual story is that some bloke took his kid to the local swimming pool not having been informed that it had been booked for a women-only session. Big deal. Judging by reports in the Mail and other right-wing papers, there’s barely a single swimming pool in the UK that hasn’t been taken over by Muslims.

Muslims can learn from this new Jewish group, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yasmin Alibhai-BrownYasmin Alibhai-Brown – one of the initiators of the much-hyped but evidently stillborn New Generation Network – argues that the recently-launched Independent Jewish Voices is a model for organisation within Muslim communities:

“In key ways, this breakout faction is no different from the many Muslim challengers emerging to halt the influence of the monolithic, regressive, self-serving, presumptuous, overweening Muslim Council of Britain, funded for years by the Government without any regard for the hundreds of thousands of British Muslims who have never accepted this informal jurisdiction over our lives and thoughts….

“Rebellious British Muslims have felt the same suffocation experienced by IJV as unelected community and religious leaders found subtle, sometimes rough, ways to discredit opposing views. Religion and race were used – if you voice any disagreements with the ‘official’ line, or point out oppression within, you are charged with betraying the faith and faithful, bringing on the BNP and encouraging Islamophobia. And thus are we blackballed, decent Muslims who are concerned about the crisis we find ourselves in globally.”

Independent, 12 February 2007

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Islam is ‘backward, tribal and from a medieval period’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Kilroy-Silk set himself on a collision course with sections of the Muslim community today when he claimed that most religious doctrine practised in the UK’s mosques was “backward, tribal and from a medieval period”. The controversial MEP and former talk-show host made the remarks in an interview with the BBC in which he called for legislation to allow Muslim women into UK mosques.

Press Association, 13 February 2007

Online discussion here.