'Muslimness': What's it all in aid of?

by Brian Bamford

BRING ON the Bandwaggon of Muslim Awareness!

AFZAL KHAN MP for Manchester Gorton, wrote to Rochdale Council:

'I am writing to you in my capacity as vice-chair of the All Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. As you may be aware, in 2018 we published our report on 'Islamophobia Defined: the inquiry into a working definition of islamophobia'. The definition is 'Islamophobia is rooted in racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or a perceived of Muslimness', and includes an inexhaustive number of contemporary examples of Islamophobia. It has now been adopted by over eight hundred organisations, such as Manchester and Salford City Councils, Bury MBC, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

'Islamophobia is sadly rife across Britain - including the media and public life - and can have distressing real life implications for our Muslim community, including the threat of violence. We have seen during this Covid-19 pandemic that people of Muslim heritage have been dispropotionately affected. This Muslim Awareness Month, is the responsibility of everyone, including all levels of government, to tackle this insidious hatred.'

Yesterday, a concerned Carl Faulkner wrote in response to this that: 'Rochdale Labour and Rochdale Council have adopted a definition of Islamophobia that actually has no legal standing, but is simply something that has been pushed upon them by Afzal Khan MP.'

A CAREER BUILT on being MUSLIM

Afzal Khan was born in Pakistan and came to the UK aged 11. After leaving school without qualifications, he had a number of jobs, including as a Greater Manchester Police constable, before returning to education and qualifying as a solicitor:[1] He is now a partner of solicitors Mellor & Jackson in Oldham.

Khan was first elected a Labour Councillor in 2000, being re-elected in 2004, 2007 and 2011, representing Cheetham Ward. He served as Executive Member for Children's Services. Khan became the first Muslim Lord Mayor of Manchester, taking the position for 2005–2006.

In 2010, Khan was appointed CBE for his race relations work.

In March 2017, he applied to be Labour's candidate in the 2017 Manchester Gorton by-election and was officially selected on 22 March.[14] During the by-election, he said "I condemn the statements made by Ken Livingstone and I believe there is no place for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party." He added, "I have been a lifelong campaigner against racism and anti-Semitism. In 2008, I was awarded a CBE in part for my work encouraging greater understanding between Muslims and Jews."

GORTON's FASHION for 'FOOT in the MOUTH' MPs

Khan was again selected for as the Labour candidate for Gorton in the general election and was elected, becoming Manchester's first Muslim MP.[17] In July 2017, Khan was appointed Shadow Immigration Minister.

However, in July 2019, Khan had to humbly apologised when he shared on Facebook two years earlier a video of American comedian Jon Stewart talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. The text under the video referred to an "Israel-British-Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate" and "mass murdering Rothschilds Israeli mafia criminal liars". Khan said he was "mortified", claiming "I didn't read the text below, which contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy about the Rothschilds. I would never have shared it if I had seen that".

It may be worth mentioning that from 1983-2017, Sir Gerald Kaufman, Father of the House of Commons, represented the same Manchester Gorton constituency. And should I say funnily enough in November 2015, he too was castigated by none other than Jeremy Corbyn for claiming: “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative party – as in the general election in May – support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives,” Kaufman said. “There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel whatever government does and they are not interested in what Israel, in what the Israeli government does.

“They’re not interested in the fact that Palestinians are living a repressed life, and are liable to be shot at any time. In the last few days alone the Israelis have murdered 52 Palestinians and nobody pays attention and this government doesn’t care.”

At that time predictable Jeremy Corbyn released a statement saying that Kaufman’s remarks were 'completely unacceptable and deeply regrettable'. He added 'Such remarks are damaging to community relations, and also do nothing to benefit the Palestinian cause,' he said. 'I have always implacably opposed all forms of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia and will continue to do so. At my request, the chief whip has met Sir Gerald and expressed my deep concern.'

In such a climate of clumsy bumbling blundering politicians, can we be sure that the smart suited former solicitor Afzal Khan MP for Gorton, will not fall foul again of the standards and the taboos of the Muslimness criterior, which he and others are recomending? Or is it just another opportunity for virtue signaliing

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British Elites Know Who Isn’t Quite Their Type

The term “posh” appeals to foreigners, but the British know there are teeth underneath the smile.

As a British journalist living abroad, I get asked many questions, from the role of the queen to the peculiarities of Parliament. But one theme comes up again and again: poshness. What does it really mean? What’s posh, and what isn’t? Outsiders think they know the term, but they don’t understand it viscerally. And they often miss that when the British deploy the term, it comes with an edge whetted on the stone of class.

Understanding poshness matters, especially since it is in the air again: Like the damp in an old country house, it never truly goes away. And it’s back now with the current British prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an alumni of Eton College, the University of Oxford, and the Bullingdon Club. It can be seen plainly in the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose aristocratic self-fashioning is so risibly parodic he’s been labeled the “honorable member for the 18th century.”

Americans, in particular, lap it up. The notion of poshness seems to stir in them a kind of longing for the orderly hierarchies of the old world. They think of it as classy. They chuckle at those Brits and their cute accents, or they gasp in admiration or bewilderment at Downton Abbey. In fact, outsiders everywhere seem to admire it—but they miss the underlying complexities of class, and, as a result, they misunderstand Britain.

Poshness has frayed and faded over the years, but it lives on in a series of customs and habits, many of them inherited from feudal times: riding to hounds; murdering pheasants, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, and really anything with a pulse in the right season; drinking too much wine; and occasionally bonking each other’s spouses. It’s an attitude better suited to times of indulgence than ones of moral rectitude; the Victorian era, with its great surge of the middle class, was distinctly anti-posh, until it swung back the other way with the bulgy sybarite Edward VII.

More than anything else, to be posh is to reside at the top end of an ancient caste system. This is what outsiders all too often miss about class. They admire the aesthetics and the charm of what appears posh but miss the unforgiving social stratification that class imposes on Britain.

Johnson is the 20th prime minister to have attended Eton—a single astonishingly dominant school. Under Boris and his Etonian predecessor David Cameron, homelessness in the United Kingdom nearly tripled. Posh people, meanwhile, still own much of the country. Research published in 2019 found that some 25,000 people—and a few corporations—own more than 50 percent of land in the U.K. The Duke of Buccleuch’s estates, for example, extend to nearly half a percent of the entire country. And even when working-class people break into the professions, they earn 17 percent less a year than their posh contemporaries.

At the core of poshness is a network, a tapestry of titled aristocrats, gentry, and the fanciest of the upper-upper-middle classes. They attend the same schools (Eton, Harrow, Downe House, Marlborough, Winchester) and universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bristol, St. Andrews) and eventually intermarry to keep the whole show on the road. Poshness derives much of its power from educational hegemony. Even as the number of privately educated pupils at Oxbridge has declined, the grip of the elite high schools has tightened. A 2018 report revealed that eight top schools in the U.K. get as many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge as three-quarters of all schools and colleges put together.

And that’s key to poshness: It’s not just about money. It’s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “the right kind of person.” Poshness usually comes with wealth but not always. You can be posh but not rich, though it’s difficult to sustain indefinitely, and you can certainly be rich but not posh. Self-made moguls such as Philip Green (of Topshop) and Alan Sugar (of Amstrad) are seen as decidedly gauche. What poshness guarantees is access to wealth, even when you’re broke: the ability, for example, to bum around friends’ house parties and borrow holiday homes in Italy or France. And it can catapult you into the top; going to the right school makes you 94 times more likely to reach the country’s professional elite.

Posh is also an aesthetic, the original shabby chic—one that signals not just possession of land but also the antiquity and confidence of its ownership. Grand houses, yes, but with fraying rugs and dreadful central heating, full of tweed jackets and Wellington boots that don’t belong to anyone in particular but line up muddily by the front door for whoever is nominated to take the dogs out.

Poshness is a voice, sometimes described as cut glass—pronounced clearly and carefully. And with the voice comes a dialect: Say loo, not toilet; scent, not perfume; and napkin, not serviette. The forbidden terms are French and thus associated with middle-class social climbers striving to use seemingly classy language.

Many foreigners think posh is a compliment, but only posh people view it as such—and even then not always. Everyone else in Britain uses it as an insult. To be called posh outside of the houses of the posh is to be called spoiled, entitled, or pretentious.

The British monitor class carefully. And maybe that gives them an edge, a certain realism, especially over their trans-Atlantic cousins. Class is not the story America chooses to tell about itself today. People don’t write about it. They don’t make movies about it. The national myth is founded on the idea of freedom, wealth, and opportunity unshackled from the conventions of the old world. And if one doesn’t like that story, well, then there’s a far gloomier one to tell about racial oppression and native genocide. Class doesn’t usually come into it, much as the British often overlook race.

But when you examine the numbers, the British have a slight edge on social mobility over Americans. A child born into a family in the bottom 20th percentile of income levels has an 11.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20th percentile in the U.K.—as compared with a 7.8 percent chance in the United States. Tellingly, Americans are much more likely to overestimate social mobility in their country, even though the middle class has grown in Britain while it has shrunk in the United States. Much of Britain’s relative success on that front has been driven by traditional equalizers such as universal health care and low-cost higher education. Yet those systems were in fact created in part because of poshness—the middle-class politicians who created them despised and campaigned against the aristocracy. So too, ironically enough, was the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s—a grocer’s daughter who taught herself a posh accent but whose contempt for antique institutions was legendary. A country that thinks about class so obsessively also understands its power better.

The specifics of British poshness might be unique, but to understand its core, take a look at the people who have power almost anywhere in the world—and examine whose kids they are and what schools they went to. They might speak with a different accent, be less charming, and have less of a fondness for dogs and horses—but they will likely embody the inherited privilege that comes with being posh.

Josh Glancy is the Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Times. Twitter: @joshglancy.

Foreign Policy

Published from Foreign Policy & the George Orwell facebook page

EXTINCTION REBELLION's TOPLESS PROTEST

YESTERDAY TOPLESS Extinction Rebellion activists were seized by police after padlocking themselves to the gates of Parliament with a banner reading 'Can't Bare the Truth?' today on the final day of climate change protest.

About 30 women gathered in central London wearing just face masks branded with '4C' and trousers, and joined hands as they chained themselves to the black railings surrounding the Palace of Westminster.

The women used D-locks to chain themselves by the neck to the railings at 9.30am on the final day of the XR protests in London.

The Metropolitan Police began shifting the women around mid-day. A spokesperson for the Met said they could not confirm the number of women arrested during the protest.

XR tweeted in response to today's demonstration: The forces of the state mobilise to crush dissent & protect the interests of the powerful, mothers & babies step up to defend the truth. We are in a #ClimateEmergency.

'

We face a 4C increase in temperature in the lifetime of this child. 4C = the death of millions. #WeWantToLive'.

XR activist and teacher Sarah Mintram told the Daily Mail: 'Now we've got your attention. By neglecting to communicate the consequences of a 4C world - war, famine, drought, displacement - the Government are failing to protect us.'

Officers removed the D-locks from their necks and took the women to police stations in four separate vans as supporters cheered the protesters on from Parliament Square.

The radical climate action group made headlines at the weekend after it blockaded the Newsprinters printing presses and delayed the distribution of hundreds of thousands of newspapers including the Mail.

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BRING BACK KROPOTKIN!

by Christopher Draper

MANCHESTER’s People’s History Museum aims to depict all political strands that comprise Britain’s rich labour tradition but one aspect is notably absent. There’s more to politics than voting and the anti-Parliamentary ideas and artifacts of the hugely influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) have been exiled to the museum’s storeroom. 

When the institution opened in London in 1975 Kropotkin’s desk and chair were prominently displayed and visitors learnt from attached brass plaques that they’d previously belonged to radical campaigner Richard Cobden but when the collection moved to Manchester these exhibits were curiously removed.  Curiously because Cobden is strongly associated with Manchester, where he founded the 'Anti Corn Law League', was MP for Stockport then for Rochdale, lived for years at nearby 19, Quay Street, has a statue erected to his memory in St Anne’s Square and a bust on view in the Town Hall.  As activists have successfully campaigned for blue plaques memorialising Kropotkin’s former homes in Bromley and Brighton, so now with the approaching centenary of his death on 8th, February 1921, what better time to restore these key exhibits to public view?

                                  WHOSE HERITAGE?

'HERITAGE' in Britain generally promotes a ruling class perspective with stately homes, art galleries and statues of the “Great and Good” predominant.  Since the 1893 foundation of the Independent Labour Party Britain’s official labour movement directed most its time, money and energy into getting Labour governments elected and few resources were spared for independent working class education and preserving, recording and presenting the artifacts and history of workers’ struggles.

To secure adequate resources the Manchester museum treads a perilous path between faithfully recording campaigns for freedom and equality whilst not upsetting establishment sources of funding. From its roots in the labour movement the museum has over the years moved into the heritage industry, successfully widening its popular appeal and funding-base but along the way it’s quietly succumbed to 'ideological cleansing', gently edging anarchism out of the picture in order to
represent Parliamentary power as the ultimate goal of past struggles. 

There’s no denying that Parliamentary politics dominate the labour movement but revolutionary ideas and movements were and remain a vital thread in the tapestry.  There’s more to labour history than campaigns for the franchise and it’s essential that displays also reflect the continuing battle for ideas within the movement.  With the Cobden connection and the fast approaching centenary (Feb 2021), it’s time Kropotkin’s artifacts along with an explanation of anarchism’s political significance were restored to the museum’s public galleries.

                Slippery Slope from Limehouse to Manchester

THE collection was begun in the 1960’s by enthusiastic members of the 'Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society' who eventually secured exhibition space at Limehouse Town Hall.  The museum’s moving spirit and founding curator was Harold Fry who’d started work in a brush factory at the tender age of eleven before campaigning for years to persuade the Labour movement to value its own history, 'because it is not yet history conscious.  The movement must know where it has been to know where it is going… we want to educate the public, to balance the history of the ruling classes, which they are taught, with the people’s history'.

On 19th Monday 1975 Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opened the 'National Museum of Labour History', accompanied by Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Hugh Scanlon and Clive Jenkins, and in an ominous gesture of vacuous popularism donated his pipe for exhibition, 'but not the famous clogs in which he is said in some speeches to have trudged as a ragged urchin to Milnsbridge Council School' (Clement Attlee’s pipe is on reverent display in the current museum). 

The museum remained in Limehouse until 1985 when it was promised a new, larger home at the
redundant Mile End Baths. In the course of conversion it was discovered that the baths was contaminated with asbestos and on so the collection was packed away and remained in storage until a funding offer was made by Greater Manchester authorities.  A new trust was formed and in 1990 the collection went on display again, initially occupying part of the old 'Manchester Mechanics Institute' in Princess Street, in 1868 the first meeting place of the Trade Union Congress. In 1994 the collection moved into its present home in a beautifully restored hydraulic pumping station on the banks of Manchester’s river Irwell.

Still officially registered as the 'National Museum of Labour History' on moving north the institution re-opened under the new, establishment-friendly title of the 'People’s History Museum'.  In an apparently continuing quest for ever greater de-politicisation and vacuity, the collection now bills itself as the 'National Museum of Democracy'.  If this trend continues perhaps Clement Attlee’s pipe will soon be confined to storage lest it be viewed as an incitement to revolution!

                                      The Anarchist Prince

IRONICALLY, throughout the three decades Kropotkin lived in England he was welcomed rather than feared by 'civilised society'.  As an internationally respected geographer and scientist as well as an acknowledged, if alienated, member of Russia’s aristocracy his ideas and activities were even sympathetically reported by the London Times.  'Mutual Aid', Kropotkin’s classic rejoinder to T. H. Huxley’s interpretation of the social consequences of Darwinism will forever serve as eloquent testimony to the cooperative impulse that underlies anarchism and indeed all progressive politics.
Sadly for Kropotkin’s last years in England he alienated former anarchist comrades by supporting the war against Germany but retained friendships with local members of the Brighton labour movement. When he departed for Russia in 1917 he took with him seventy tea chests of books and papers but presented his desk to Brighton Trades Council (who subsequently donated it to the museum). 

This episode in itself  offers any museum worth its salt an ideal opportunity to pose important questions of political loyalty to interested visitors.  Finally returning to Russia on 12th June 1917 Kropotkin’s support for the revolution but opposition to the Bolsheviks might similarly raise critical questions in the mind of anyone viewing Kropotkin exhibits, and reading interpretive boards about his life.  
       
                        - 'Labour History Museum'  –  
             - Lively Debating Chamber or Necropolis? -

Despite my reservations about the some of the innovations, the museum’s administrators have worked wonders keeping the collection together, conserving the artefacts, providing imaginative attractive displays and continuing to offer free admission.   Everyone involved deserves to be heartily congratulated.  This year (2019) the “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair” returned to the museum increasing the impetus to restore anarchist content to the galleries.  'People’s History' isn’t a
lost world of clog dancing,  Hovis adverts and chimney sweeps, it should stimulate political questions about the past, present and future.  It is a vital debate that recognises Parliament may be a political preoccupation for many but it’s not the realisation of labour’s 'New Jerusalem'.  The return to public view of Kropotkin’s furniture won’t change the world or frighten the horses but it might stimulate debate and attract the interest of a younger generation turned off by traditional politics. 

Why not visit the museum yourself, hand in a card (or email - Katy.Ashton@phm.org.uk) requesting the return of Kropotkin’s desk before the 8th, February 2021 centenary of his death?  Refusing to vote isn’t anarchy in action if you do nothing to promote positive alternatives - Stand up for Kropotkin’s chair!

                                                                                                       Christopher Draper (Dec 2019)

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