The Cambridge Professor & the Burnley Welder

'WHITE LIVES DON'T MATTER'

by Les May

I HAVE been writing pieces for Northern Voices for about five years.  Everything I write I try to make sure is factually accurate and if possible provide links to where further information can be found so that anyone reading what I write can decide for themselves whether I am ‘cherry picking’, rather than presenting a full picture.  I do not guarantee that what I am writing now is factually accurate; however I will try.

The reason for my scepticism is that it involves things being posted on Twitter.   

Looking through these Twitter posts and trying to decide who is attacking or supporting who, has all the allure of wading in a slurry pit in open toed sandals.

On 22 June a recently appointed Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal, posted a ‘tweet’ which said “I’ll say it again.  White Lives Don’t Matter.   As white lives”.  It has been claimed that she did this in response to a banner flown over a football stadium that read "White lives matter Burnley". Following this, abusive messages directed at her, including death threats and rape, were posted on Twitter.  Having read some of these I can only say that you will meet nicer turds in a slurry pit.

A somewhat more rational response has come from those signing an online petition at Change.org which reads:

"Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”
“Her statements are racist and hateful and must not be tolerated by Cambridge University leadership.  Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms. Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”

Her employers, Cambridge University, responded by saying;  ‘The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks.   These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease.’
So what happened to the person behind the airborne banner?  Did his employers rush to issue a statement supporting his right to express his lawful opinion? Not quite!   Jake Hepple was dismissed from his job as a welder by Paradigm Precision.  His girlfriend Megan Rambadt, was also sacked from her job as beautician.  If he is in a union will he get support from that quarter?  I wouldn’t count on it.

One reason I write for Northern Voices is that it makes an effort to implement what George Orwell said:  ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.  As I accept this dictum I cannot support either the petition to have this woman dismissed, nor the actions of Paradigm Precision in sacking this man. 
 
What this shows is that privilege in our society is not about what colour your skin happens to be, it manifests itself in what position you hold, what you earn, where you live and who respects your views.  I’ll let you figure out who I think is the privileged one in this case.  Why is it acceptable for Jake to join the ranks of the unemployed and not Priya? 
 
I have already made clear my opinion of the people who are attacking her, rather than attacking her opinions.   But if she is daft, or naive, enough to post deliberately inflammatory comments on Twitter I’m afraid my sympathy for her is not very great and overall she does not come over as a very nice lady.

According to the website below, “she has earlier called for the persecution of Hindus and branded them sickos”.

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/cambridge-professor-priyamvada-gopal-tweets-white-lives-dont-matter-follows-it-up-with-abolish-brahmins-and-upper-castes

But for me the icing on the cake was an item in the Deccan Chronicle from July 2018 which mentioned that she had tweeted that she would no longer supervise students at King’s College because the porters did not address her as ‘Doctor’. Isn’t that what you call a ‘snob’?

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Let's Talk About The War

by Les May

SIR John Hawkins is considered the first English trader to profit from the demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century.  In other words he, along with Sir Francis Drake, was a slave traders as well as privateer.

From 1577 onwards Hawkins was Treasurer of the English Navy.  He rebuilt older ship and helped design newer, faster, sleeker, more manoeuvrable ‘race-built galleons’.  These were the ships that he and Drake commanded when with less than fifty ships they took on and defeated the 130 strong Spanish Armada in 1588.

The stories around this have sometimes been described as forming the ‘foundation myth’ of English identity; plucky little England standing up to more powerful bullies and giving them a ‘bloody nose’.  Nearly five hundred years later it was woven into another now British myth in Edward Shanks’ poem ‘The other little boats’ (see below)

On 13 July 1916 my uncle Tom died during the battle of the Somme, when ‘lions were led by donkeys’.  His name is on the war memorial in Littleborough near Rochdale. Somewhere in Germany there will be memorial with the name of a man who died the same day.  On the island of Tiree there is a tiny graveyard and in it are fifteen stones recording Merchant Seamen whose bodies washed up on its beaches in WW2.   Near Kiel is the Möltenort U-Boat Memorial it records the names of the 30,000 submariners who died in the same war.

In Europe we have learned to live with the knowledge that our past and those who peopled it, were imperfect.  We do not demand that the names of the U boat crew who fought for the Nazis be erased from memory.  We honour them as brave men, like we honour the imperfect men who ran up the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

It is that capacity, to not forget what happened, but also not to hold grudges about it, that gives me a sense of pride in being British.  Perhaps that is just something that my generation, who knew people on both sides who had lived through WW2 and are thankful it did not happen to them, can feel.  Particularly amongst students it seems that it is being replaced by an intolerant and puritanical insistence that only those whose views are deemed acceptable in the present should be remembered. Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

If I take a somewhat jaundiced view of this it is nothing to how I feel about those privileged academics who, no doubt with an eye on furthering their careers, have decided that ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon us even unto the third and fourth generation’.  Yes, Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

The Other Little Boats

A pause came in the fighting and England held her breath
For the battle was not ended and the ending might be death
Then out they came, the little boats, from all the Channel shores
Free men were those who set the sails and laboured at the oars.
From Itchenor and Shoreham, from Deal and Winchelsea,
They put out into the Channel to keep their country free.
Not of Dunkirk this story, but of boatmen long ago,
When our Queen was Gloriana and King Philip was our foe,
And galleons rode the narrow seas, and Effingham and Drake
Were out of shot and powder, with all England still at stake.
They got the shot and powder, they charged the guns again,
The guns that guarded England from the galleons of Spain,
And the men that helped them do it, helped them still to hold the sea
Men from Itchenor and Shoreham, men from Deal and Winchelsea,
Looked out happily from heaven and cheered to see the work
Of their grandsons' grandsons' grandsons on the beaches of Dunkirk.

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An Everyday Story Of Virtue Signalling

by Les May

I FIND it difficult to have much sympathy with Maxine Peake and Rebecca Long-Bailey.  Both seem to have been keen to be seen to be ‘on the side of the angels’ with regard to the murder of George Floyd and it has backfired spectacularly.  It must have come as an especially big surprise to Long-Bailey who in February of this year declared herself to be a ‘Zionist’

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/will-they-never-learn.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/tail-succeeds-in-wagging-dog.html

Peake may have had to admit that her assumptions were wrong about where Minneapolis police force learned their brutal tactics, but it interesting to pose the question of whether there would have been this much fuss had she claimed that it was the South African or Chinese police who acted as mentors.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/maxine-peake-interview-labour-corbyn-keir-starmer-black-lives-matter-a9583206.html

I think not!

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Trump And China

by Les May

I HAVE dabbled with computers for forty years.  For the last dozen years it has been mostly ‘junked’ laptops I have resurrected by installing the free, as in free beer and free of Microsoft, Linux operating system.  Though not free like the old laptops, in recent months I’ve bought a couple of tiny machines which are less than 3cm x 6cm in size and cost me about £5 each.  In case you are inclined to think these are toys I will mention that they have dual processors, and wifi and bluetooth built in.  They are meant for the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT).   I write programs on a laptop, download them to these tiny machines and then they run autonomously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things

(Scroll down to the section of privacy and security concerns)

But that’s not the most significant thing about them.  They encapsulate the real problem that Donald Trump and the rest of the USA have with China.   Trump may like to claim that China is involved in the wholesale theft of ‘Intellectual Property’ from the US, but these devices are an entirely home grown product, and what they show is that, like it or not, China is beating the USA at its own game; innovating and making things to sell to the rest of the world.

The same goes for the UK.  In Britain we refer to someone who makes ‘bath bombs’ in their kitchen as an ‘entrepreneur’.  The Chinese have entrepreneurs too, and they encourage and fund them, so there may be a lesson for us here. We may feel threatened by the face recognition technology is ubiquitous in cities, but lets face it, getting that working is a bit more difficult than making bath bombs.

What we have not noticed in the West is that China is a communist country in name only. It’s got its share of billionaires and an affluent middle class.  Watch the videos and TV footage and spot the Apple shops, Burberry shops etc.  MaoI recently heard a Chinese political scientist explain in impeccable English that in the US you can change your party, but not your politics, but in China you can change your politics, but not your party.

What he meant was that in the US the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, whilst in China, since the revolution which brought Mao to power in 1949 the political landscape has changed immeasurably as the country has embraced the market economy and in doing so has lifted something like a half a billion people out of poverty, but that the same political party has retained power throughout that time.

Asked whether that made China a capitalist country like the USA he explained why it did not by saying ‘In the USA the politicians have allowed the capitalists to run the country; in China the politicians made sure they do not.’

Trump’s use of ‘Kung Flu’ to describe the virus which causes Covid 19 has predictably been labelled as ‘racist’, but it tells us more about his juvenile sense of humour and misses the point anyhow; Trump is signalling to his followers that China is the new enemy.

Thirty years ago I heard schoolchildren describing something they did not think much of as ‘Chink made’ and to many of us the Chinese were just that, ‘Chinks’. We’ve grown out of that, but deep down we still believe that they cannot have invented something themselves, they must have stolen the technology from the West; they cannot possibly have been successful in keeping the deaths from Covid 19 so low, they must be lying; if the virus was circulating last autumn, (as seems to be the case), they must have known about it and did not tell the WHO; the virus could not possibly have crossed the species barrier from bat to ‘what?’ to humans, they must have created it in the lab and were too careless to contain it.   Is this an example of what is meant by ‘institutional racism’?

Reagan and Thatcher could always point to a communist USSR as ‘the Red menace’; Trump cannot do that with China as it is clearly communist in name only.  But with a little help from his friends in the West, Trump has floated all of these accusations in one way or another.  Have his western friends just played the part of ‘useful idiots’?   Is he laying the groundwork for a new cold war which will conveniently ‘hot up’ a couple of months before the November election?

The political systems in both the US and in China have one thing in common; they both rely upon an underclass to sustain them.  In the US it’s those who have two jobs and visit food banks just to survive.  In China it’s the migrant workers living three families to a single flat in a city far from home. Some things don’t change it seems.

Question:  Does having a market economy, irrespective of what you call the political system, inevitably mean having very large differences in income and wealth?  Discuss.

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'White Lives Matter': In defence of doggerel

 Black and White who is right?

 by Brian Bamford

 'Eliot’s fondness for doggerel and light verse, in particular, was intertwined with a racist notion of blackness as a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play.'*

• The New YorkerDec 16, 2019

IT was announced last night that the Lancashire police have said that no criminal offence took place when a banner reading 'White Lives Matter Burnley' was towed past the football stadium during Monday night’s Premier League game between Manchester City and Burnley.  It is perfectly clear by now that the language being used here has become 'a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play' that is having massive consequences even as I write.

We at Northern Voices would find broad qualified agreement with what Iffy Onuora, the equalities officer of the Professional Footballers’ Association, said on Tuesday that he was hoping that the widespread condemnation of the banner would act as a catalyst for further conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement.  And he concluded:

'The words themselves aren’t offensive, it’s just the context.  It’s the rejection of the conversation we’re having at the moment.  That’s what it represents,' Onoura told the BBC.  'I guess people have the right to do it. For me it’s just proof again that these things can lead to positive things because all that’s been said in the 12 hours since the game finished has been, again, a catalyst, another conversation to have.'

Let's have conversations yes, yet I think we would add that it throws light on the two-faced hypocrisy of some people who are obsessed with skin colour.  What has happened since the flight on Monday night is that it brought forth a barrage of unbelievable humbug and virtue signalling by the most feeble minded elements on the left.

Meanwhile the police have said that after assessing all the information available surrounding the incident, the force had concluded 'that there are no criminal offences that have been disclosed at this time'.
'We will continue to work with our partners at the football club and within the local authority,' added Ch Supt Russ Procter.

I accept that the meaning of words are in their use rather than in the dictionary definition.  But the use of doggerel can be problematic. When more than a decade ago in moving a motion, I broke into some doggerel at a Trade Union Council conference; I was denouncing what are called scabs or sometimes dare I say 'blacklegs' - unskilled workers, who were being used I used rhyming slang or doggerel as 'Chancers - Bengal Lancers' to describe the strike breakers, sadly and predictably, I was challenged for 'racist' talk. 

I do worry about all this po-faced lack of humour on the British left.

*  

Sometimes doggerel has a non-critical meaning: plenty of popular comic poets (like Lewis Carroll or any limerick inventor) had no aim to make great art, just great light verse, and they succeeded brilliantly. They were masters of doggerel. But pity the earnest highbrow poet like the immortal Scotsman William McGonagall whose doggerel was so bad his audience frequently pelted him with eggs and rotting vegetables. Now his poetry was only fit for the dogs.

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'Cult of Colston' & the 'Constipated Clerks'

by Brian Bamford
In a comment on this NV Blog John Pearson said:
 'The British ruling class can take lessons from no-one on efforts to "bury the past, hide it, and sanitize it".

 & that
'Those Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol, descendants of slaves, many of whom will have been trafficked by Colston's company, were not erasing history they were making history.' *

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THE LAST time I was in Bristol it was at the invite of the Bristol Radical History Group at a Bookfair in 2011 to give a talk on 'The varieties of historical investigation and experience'.  The Bristol Radical History Group has been at the forefront of the campaign against the slave trader Edward Colston whose statue was recently toppled in Bristol. **


Marxists writers often vary between those like John Pearson, who credit the British ruling class as superbly cunning little Machiavellian's, and those who rate the boss class as little more than incompetent buffoons.

In Bristol it was, where over recent years my friend Roger Ball would take folk on a pedestrian stroll round the city to appraise and provide an alternative view of the ‘cult of Colston’ that was said to "form part of our city’s ‘identity’."*  Only to culminate at Bristol Cathedral, to discuss 'how the institutions of the Church of England and the Merchant Venturers collide within the education of our children to promote Colston as a Parable of the Good Samaritan.'


George Orwell once remarked that 'whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.'

As long as I have lived my life the British Empire has been in a state of decline.  Men like Edward Colston, were a  bygone thing even between the wars.  As Orwell argued in The Lion & The Unicorn:  'Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire.  By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall.' [1941]

Yet it is unlikely that either Comrade Pearson or Dr. Ball would ever venture to unleash their passions against the constipated clerks who had by then taken over from the empire builders of yesterday.  So as long as I have been alive its been the clerks that have been in the driving seat, but no one is going to launch a war against these clerks and managers, because these are the very people who sign the cheques and give the research grants so that these post-modern historians can get awarded their PhDs.  These constipated clerks are the modern managerial class who have taken over not just in the universities; and you just don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Instinctively both John Pearson and Roger Ball will identify with the clerks who among other things administer our universities and so vividly contrast with the one-time empire builders, because it is now as fashionable as it was in the 1930s for the shallow leftists to look down on physical prowess and snigger at the very idea of Englishness.

The last time I saw Roger Ball was at the Casa Club in Liverpool on the 8th, June 2018, at an event organised by Ian Gwinn and was entitled 'Fuck May 1968'; at that time Roger had been anxiously scouring the thoroughfares of the city looking for suitable architectural monuments to condemn owing to their links with slavery.  Though I have great respect for the research work Roger Ball has put into this issue, I do share the concerns of others like Derek Pattison and Les May about as to what will be the logical outcome of this kind of fetish for censorship.

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*    After popular demand the Countering-Colston group are re-running their recent history walk.

Starting with St Mary Redcliffe church, this walk takes in other historic Diocese of Bristol churches in the city centre where ‘the life and work’ of Edward Colston is still provided religious legitimacy on an annual basis.

Along the way we will share the most recent historical research regarding this man’s involvement with the transatlantic slave trade and discover how the Victorian elite created a ‘cult of Colston’ that is now said to form part of our city’s ‘identity’.

At our final stop, Bristol Cathedral, we discuss how the institutions of the Church of England and the Merchant Venturers collide within the education of our children to promote Colston as a Parable of the Good Samaritan.

**https://twitter.com/i/status/1269634408069435392

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World Refugee Day: Who ******* Cares?

by Les May

YESTERDAY was Juneteenth, it marks the day when slavery was finally ended in the state of Texas 155 years ago.   It produced rallies all over the USA and today there will be ’demos’ in major cities in the UK ostensibly in support of ‘black lives matter’, though not doubt the opportunity to air other grievances will not be missed.

Today is World Refugee Day, it marks the fact that 80 million people, 1% of the world population, have been displaced by war, persecution and famine.  Will it produce similar ‘demos’ throughout the land?  Probably not.

What was it that George Orwell’s animals in his fable Animal Farm had to say? Oh yes! ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’.

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Social Distancing: How Far? How Fast?

by Les May

THERE is likely to be an announcement about changing the advice on ‘social distancing’ within the next few days.  At present it is recommended that we remain at least two metres away from anyone else who is not a member of our immediate family.  Schools have had to reorganise their layout and time tables to accommodate this and it has effectively meant that pubs, restaurants etc would not be viable businesses even if they were allowed to open.

So what impact could a reduction in social distancing have on the spread of Covid 19 disease?  The likelihood of picking up an infection is greater if one is closer to someone else, but it is also increased if you are close to more people.

At first sight it might seem that reducing the recommended distance to one metre would double the number of people you were likely to encounter.  In fact it would quadruple the number.  Reducing the recommended distance to one and a half metres would mean you were likely to meet just over twice as many people, two and a quarter as many to be exact.

It will be interesting to see if the humanities graduates who dominate the media can do the sums.

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Recolonising Africa?

by Les May

A FEW hours after war was declared at 11 p.m. on 4 August 1914, the paddle driven cable laying ship Alert was sent out from Dover on a planned mission to drag for, and cut, the five German cables in the English Channel which linked to the rest of the world.   The idea was to force German communications on to radio where they could be intercepted more easily and so give British codebreakers a better chance of gaining useful information.

Although they may seem old and outdated undersea cables, now having the benefit of fibre optic technology, still carry the majority of the Internet traffic around the world.   The amount of Internet traffic which a cable can carry at any one time is called its ‘bandwidth’.  The more people who want to use the Internet at any one time, the more bandwidth is necessary.  Compared with America, Asia and Europe the cables linking Africa to the rest of the world are seriously lacking in bandwidth.

Whether changing this situation is more important than improving access to clean water and sanitation, and improving access to health care, is a moot point, though in my book I regard these as a ‘human right’.  But earlier today I heard two Africans, one in Ethiopia and one in South Africa claiming that access to the Internet was itself a human right. (Remember how six months ago Corbyn was laughed at when he said a Labour government would promote free Internet access?)

Within Africa mobile phones and the Internet have expanded what people can do even in areas where not everyone has access to an electricity supply. Some enterprising individuals allow mobile phone owners to recharge their device for a small sum. Potentially there is a huge unsatisfied market in Africa. Unsurprisingly this has attracted the attention of cash rich multi-national businesses.

Facebook and Google are intending to team up to lay 37,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable to link African countries with the rest of the world.  The Chinese company Huawei, Microsoft, like Facebook and Google a USA based company and the Norwegian company Opera, (see below), also have projects targeting Africa. Should we be worried about this? Should Africans be worried?

Huawei’s interest seems clear. It supplies the hardware which makes systems run. Microsoft has an interest in making sure that the millions of new users become hooked on its software.

Potentially the ownership by Facebook and Google of the physical network and their control over what content Internet users have access to, seems to me problematic.  It has been suggested that Facebook has harvested up to 4,000 snippets of data about many users.  This is enables the company to form a profile of every individual user.  Likewise Google has the power to harvest a great deal of information from the search terms we use.

There is good evidence that Facebook was used to sway the outcome of the 2016 elections in the USA when about 77,000 voters in three states were targeted. Trump lost the popular vote by about 3 million ballots, but gained the presidency because the make up of the electoral college had been influenced via Facebook. Not all African leaders are models of integrity and defenders of democracy.

https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/fln36fd-soc-2016election/facebook-and-the-2016-election-the-facebook-dilemma/

Another issue is that Europe in particular has gone a long way to recognising the importance of personal privacy and protection of personal data.  This is not the case in other countries and many African states may have legal systems which are very weak in this regard.  Facebook and Google will only respect these issues if they are made to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

https://www.contagious.com/news-and-views/shoshana-zuboff-on-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism

We are familiar with the term ‘Scramble for Africa’ which refers to the invasion, occupation, colonisation and annexation of African territories by European countries in the period 1880 to 1914.  Are we about to see this process happening again, but this time led not by nation states.  Has colonialism been privatised?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa

(I struggled to determine the exact ownership of ‘Opera’.  It may be owned by a Chinese private equity firm or it may still be Norwegian.  I am not sure which of these is correct.)

Author's Note:  

Les May said...

In the above piece I suggested that many African states which may have legal system that are weak with respect to personal privacy and data protection, and that Facebook and Google will be in a position to take advantage of this.

A report by several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) published today (18 June) highlights the problems facing a country, Nigeria, which had weak laws regarding the protection of the environment, which was taken advantage of by Shell. So polluted by oil contamination is the water supply for people living in the delta of the Niger that the cannot by any reasonable standards be said to have access to a clean water supply.

https://cloud.foeeurope.org/index.php/s/LyqrCFskx2RRdcf#pdfviewer

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/nigeria-shell-still-failing-clean-pollution-niger-delta

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