Tag: racism

The sad death of the inspirational Benjamin Zephaniah

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Literature, Music, Politics, The ArtsLeave a comment

Why I am an anarchist: Benjamin Zephaniah

Thanks to Autonomies, where I found this ‘powerful’ testimonial.

A testimonial by poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah

I got political after I suffered my first racist attack at the age of seven. I didn’t understand any political theory, I just knew that I had been wronged, and I knew there was another way. A few years later, when I was fifteen a marked police car pulled up to me as I walked in Birmingham in the early hours of the morning, three cops got out of the car, they pushed me into a shop doorway, then they beat me up. They got back into their car, and drove off as if nothing had happened. I had read nothing about policing policy, or anything on so-called law and order, I just knew I had been wronged. When I got my first job as a painter, I had read nothing on the theory of working class struggles or how the rich exploited the poor, but when my boss turned up every other day in a different supercar, and we were risking our lives up ladders and breathing in toxic fumes, I just knew I had been wronged.

I grew up (like most people around me) believing Anarchism meant everyone just going crazy, and the end of everything. I am very dyslexic so I often have to use a spellchecker or a dictionary to make sure I’ve written words correctly. I was hearing words like Socialism and Communism all the time, but even the Socialists and Communists that I came across tended to dismiss Anarchists as either a fringe group, who they always blamed if there was trouble on demonstrations, or dreamers. Even now, I just checked a spellchecker and it describes Anarchism as chaos, lawlessness, mayhem, and disorder. I like the disorder thing, but for the ‘average’ person, disorder does mean chaos, lawlessness, and mayhem. The very things they’re told to fear the most.

The greatest thing I’ve ever done for myself is to learn how to think for myself. I began to do that at an early age, but it’s really difficult to do that when there are things around you all the time telling you how to think. Capitalism is seductive. It limits your imagination, and then tells you that you should feel free because you have choices, but your choices are limited to the products they put before you, or the limits of your now limited imagination. I remember visiting São Paulo many years ago when it introduced its Clean City Law. The mayor didn’t suddenly become an Anarchist, but he did realise that the continuous and ubiquitous marketing people were subjected to was not just ugly, but distracting people from themselves. So more than 15,000 marketing billboards were taken down. Buses, taxis, neon and paper poster advertisements were all banned. At first it looked a little odd, but instead of either looking at, or trying not to look at advertising broads, I walked, and as I walked I looked around me. I found that I only purchased what I really needed, not what I was told I needed, and what was most noticeable was that I met and talked to new people every day. These conversations tended to be relevant, political, and meaningful. Capitalism keeps us in competition with each other, and the people who run Capitalism don’t really want us to talk to each other, not in a meaningful way.

I’m not going to go on about Capitalism, Socialism, or Communism, but it is clear that one thing they all have in common is their need for power. Then to back up their drive for power they all have theories, theories about taking power and what they want to do with power, but therein lies the problem. Theories and power. I became an Anarchist when I decided to drop the theories and stop seeking power. When I stopped concerning myself with those things I realised that true Anarchy is my nature. It is our nature. It is what we were doing before the theories arrived, it is what we were doing before we were encouraged to be in competition with each other. There have been some great things written about Anarchism, and I guess that’s Anarchist theory, but when I try to get my friends to read these things (I’m talking about big books with big words), they get headaches and turn away. So, then I turn off the advertising (the TV etc.) and sit with them, and remind them of what they can do for themselves. I give them examples of people who live without governments, people who organise themselves, people who have taken back their own spiritual identity – and then it all makes sense.

If we keep talking about theories then we can only talk to people who are aware of those theories, or have theories of their own, and if we keep talking in the round about theories we exclude a lot of people. The very people we need to reach, the very people who need to rid themselves of the shackles of modern, Capitalistic slavery. The story of Carne Ross is inspiring, not because he wrote something, but because he lived it. I love the work of Noam Chomsky and I love the way that Stuart Christie’s granny made him an Anarchist, but I’m here because I understand that the racist police who beat me have the state behind them, and the state itself is racist. I’m here because I now understand that the boss-man who exploited me to make himself rich didn’t care about me. I’m here because I know how the Marrons in Jamaica freed themselves and took to the hills and proved to all enslaved people that they (the Marrons), could manage themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I love books (I’m a writer, by the way), and I know we need people who think deeply – we should all think deeply. But my biggest inspirations come from everyday people who stop seeking power for themselves, or seeking the powerful to rescue them, and they do life for themselves. I have met people who live Anarchism in India, Kenya, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and in Papua New Guinea, but when I tell them they are Anarchists most will tell me they have not heard of such a word, and what they are doing is natural and uncomplicated. I’m an Anarchist because I’ve been wronged, and I’ve seen everything else fail.

I spent the late seventies and the eighties living in London with many exiled ANC activists – after a long struggle Nelson Mandela was freed and the exiles returned home. I remember looking at a photo of the first democratically elected government in South Africa and realising that I knew two thirds of them. I also remember seeing a photo of the newly elected Blair (New Labour) government and realising that I knew a quarter of them, and on both occasions I remember how I was filled with hope. But in both cases it didn’t take long to see how power corrupted so many members of those governments. These were people I would call and say, “Hey, what are you doing?”, and the reply was always something along the lines of, “Benjamin, you don’t understand how having power works”. Well I do. Fuck power, and lets just take care of each other.

Most people know that politics is failing. That’s not a theory or my point of view. They can see it, they can feel it. The problem is they just can’t imagine an alternative. They lack confidence. I simply blanked out all the advertising, I turned off the ‘tell-lie-vision’, and I started to think for myself. Then I really started to meet people – and, trust me, there is nothing as great as meeting people who are getting on with their lives, running farms, schools, shops, and even economies, in communities where no one has power.

That’s why I’m an Anarchist.

Sanitising racism past and present: Gus John at odds with the BBC

On By Tony TaylorIn Politics, Youth Work1 Comment

 
A week ago I attended from afar the streamed New Cross Fire 40th anniversary memorial service. Through my close friendship with Malcolm Ball, a leading Lewisham youth worker and activist across the decades, my frequent visits to Deptford and indeed the St Andrews Centre, I felt I had an inkling of the grief and anger sparked by the tragedy. A week ago too Gus John was interviewed on BBC radio. You will find below his passionate, perceptive and uncomfortable account of the issues raised by the encounter. As Gus argues, ‘There is a serious debate to be had about all of these matters.’ Responses encouraged and welcomed to tonymtaylor@gmail.com

Gus writes:

OWN IT!

From ‘Nigger-hunting’ to ‘Paki-bashing’ to Police Murders….Very British Pastimes.

On 18 January 2021, on the 40th Anniversary of the New Cross Massacre, I did an interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p094dbfp

At the start of the interview, I was setting out the background to the New Cross Fire and the history of neo-fascist activity in London and the country generally and said that there had been years of neo-fascist activity in our communities including ‘Paki-bashing’ as the perpetrators themselves called it’…. And before I could complete the sentence with ‘and ‘nigger-hunting’, Elms interrupted saying ‘please don’t use that language.  We cannot use such language on the BBC’.  I determined that it would be more productive to move on to the core subject rather than remonstrate with him, but after the programme I wrote to the producer as below. His reply was both instructive and deeply concerning.  What I said and Elm’s objection to my saying it have been elided from the recording in the link above.

I believe the BBC’s position is untenable and to invoke the potentially hurt feelings of their own black staff in support of dodgy editorial decisions is just disgraceful.

I joined the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1965 and a couple years later I was one of those going around London and Leicester gathering evidence of the most vicious race discrimination, evidence which helped in no small measure to convince Harold Wilson and his government of the need for the 1968 Race Relations Act. 

 

I saw my father stumble into our house that same year, bloodied, cut and bruised all over because he had been set upon on his way from work just after 06.00 on a winter’s morning and nearly beaten to death by a group of racists with baseball bats, motorbike chains and sticks.  They seemed to come from nowhere and all he heard was ‘one less nigger’ and they were all over him. He had the presence of mind to run into somebody’s yard, pick up a bottle of milk, smash it and cut off the ear of one of his assailants, at which point they saw that he was ready to kill or be killed and they all ran off.  

A matter of weeks later, my 16 year old brother was arrested for riding his bike in the park not far from our home.  The police took him to Acton police station because he was ‘lippy’ and one of them defecated in a toilet and then pulled him out of a cell (he had not even been charged), took him to that same toilet and two of them held his head down in the faeces while they flushed the toilet.  He nearly drowned in that filth.  They then kicked him out of the police station.  He arrived home totally traumatised and couldn’t eat for days.  He remained traumatised for the rest of his short life.  He went to prison for assaulting police a couple years later and was constantly having problems with them.  He took to drink and died aged 49.  Having drunk too much on his birthday, he fell down the stairs in his own flat and broke his neck.  

My father came here in 1957 and by 1972 he and my mother were back in Grenada, having vowed never to set foot in England ever again.  They both passed on without ever visiting the UK thereafter. They must have been among the earliest returners of their generation.

Thanks to socks-studio.com

I fought off ‘nigger hunters’ in Notting Hill in 1968, especially after what had happened to my father and was angry at how nonchalant the police were about their activities, while being ever ready to frame us for having offensive weapons.  As a youth worker in Ladbroke Grove at the time, I and other youth workers constantly walked young people home or to their bus because of the relentless harassment and provocation they suffered at the hands of the police.

I of all people therefore do not need the BBC to tell me how offensive terms like ‘nigger hunting’ and ‘Paki-bashing’ actually are.  I conducted the Burnage Inquiry into the racist murder of 14 year old Bangladeshi student Ahmed Iqbal Ullah with Ian Macdonald QC and colleagues.  Having stabbed Ahmed to death, his 14 year old white student attacker ran around the school shouting hysterically ‘I killed a Paki, I killed a Paki’.

There is a serious debate to be had about all of these matters. 

One disturbing feature of the New Cross Fire story is the number of people in our communities and in the country generally below the age of 50 who have no knowledge of it.  They have no knowledge either of the firebombing of premises in New Cross, Deptford, Ladywell and Lewisham generally and attacks on Asian families in their homes and on the streets that had been perpetrated by white terrorists and neo-fascists for more than a decade before the New Cross Fire.  Such activity had a history that dated back to the 1919 racial attacks upon black service personnel demobbed from the First World War, through to ‘nigger hunting’ in London and elsewhere in the 1950s and ‘Paki-bashing’ right up to the present.

Throughout that period, also, hundreds of black people have been killed by the police with none being brought to justice since the murderers of David Oluwale in Leeds in 1969 were charged, not with murder or manslaughter, but with grievous bodily harm.

British historians have typically airbrushed the history of the barbarism of African enslavement and of British imperialism across the globe. Now, the media is leading the way in sanitising the barbarism of British racism, even as the police continue to kill black people indiscriminately while enjoying the full protection of the state and the judicial system.  One could justifiably conclude that black people, males in particular, have an unnatural propensity to die of natural causes while in the custody of the police.

So, in a society where it is deemed offensive to spell the word ‘nigger’ and the word ‘Paki’ in full in any context, black people are routinely killed by the police without the state or the nation batting an eyelid.  That is why this nation and its institutions reacted as if they needed a George Floyd event to trigger their epiphany, oblivious of the fact that we have ignored hundreds of British George Floyds, despite years of campaigning for justice in plain sight across the country. The hope is, no doubt, that it would soon be forgotten that there was a time when black people were called ‘niggers’ and ‘wogs’ and anyone who looked like they might be from the Indian subcontinent attacked and killed on the streets or in their homes with impunity.  

Racism has been sanitised and recast as ‘unconscious bias’.  British social history is being sanitised to expunge un-British activities such as ‘nigger hunting’, ‘Paki-bashing’ and police murders of black people. The expectation no doubt is that history will absolve the nation for this induced amnesia.

The email exchange following the broadcast:

From: Gus John <profgusjohn@gmail.com>
Sent: 18 January 2021 15:18
To: Jamie Collins <jamie.collins@bbc.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BBC Radio London / Robert Elms

Hi Jamie

I am glad I had the opportunity to help put the events of 40 years ago in New Cross in proper historical and political perspective and I have full admiration for the way Robert conducted the interview.  Please pass on my thanks to him.

When you reminded me to watch my language, I did not for one moment imagine that you meant I should not mention what the NF, Column 88 etc called that barbaric activity they indulged in up and down the country against the South Asian community.  I am not naive enough as to expect you and Robert Elms to change BBC policy, but as a social historian, I do worry about the full scale attempt by broadcast or for that matter print media, to sanitise the nasty and unadulterated racism to which black people are subjected in this country by not reporting such phenomena as historical fact.  In my writing and my lectures, I remind people of campaigns in the 1960s by myself and others against landlords and hoteliers who posted signs saying:  ‘No Coloureds, No Dogs, No Irish’, or ‘No Wogs, No Dogs, No Irish’, or against what the neo-fascists themselves called ‘Paki-bashing’ and ‘nigger-hunting’.  To report the barbarism of the Far Right and the atrocious terminology that they used AND THAT THE MEDIA REPORTED at the time is important in my view because Britain needs to be reminded about that history and about the fact, as I was saying in the interview, that the state did not react proportionately, or at all, to those barbaric attacks which left scores of people of the African and Asian diaspora dead.  If I say that the activities of such Far Right groups resulted in the deaths of people who were targeted only because of their ethnicity and that the perpetrators called their actions ‘Paki-bashing’, I am neither appropriating that language myself, nor using it to inflame passions within the Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities. Context is everything, even in broadcasting.  I cannot understand why the BBC should want to so infantilise its listeners as to assume that they cannot tell the difference between describing neo-fascist activity and what that activity was called by neo-fascists themselves on the one hand, and the same term(s) used contemporaneously by myself or anybody else.

The murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 was a consequence of the routine ‘nigger-hunting’ that black communities in Notting Hill and elsewhere endured at the time.  What is of consequence it seems to me, is not the fact that that terminology was and remains deeply racist, offensive and oppressive, but that white neo-fascists were allowed by the state and its police to indulge in those murderous activities with impunity.  That fact is incontrovertibly more obscene than the words themselves.   

The question is though, where in the BBC is this debate taking place and whom does it involve?

Turning to matters over which you do have some control, please send me a recording of the interview and a link to it so that I can share with others here in Wales and elsewhere.

Best wishes,

GJ

From: Jamie Collins
Sent: 18 January 2021 16:43
To: Gus John <profgusjohn@gmail.com>
Subject: RE: BBC Radio London / Robert Elms
Importance: High

Hi Gus,

I thought you were great – extremely important and poignant considering to this day many of the issues faced by those then are still having to be fought against and survived to this day. We received several messages and calls from listeners that appreciated the way we highlighted the anniversary on the show and you were integral to this.

We as an editorial team and the wider station have had numerous conversations on the use of words such as the n word or p word in full – even for illustrative purposes as you did. While I fully understand and accept why you feel it is important to say it – many of our listeners of colour and indeed staff members are offended by the full use of the word and can find it triggering. And so the reason we do not use such words is so as to ensure it does not offend those minority communities- but we also recognise that this in itself divides opinion.

I fully understand the worry that by censoring the words in this context might dilute the threat, violence and racism faced by the Black and Asian community at the time by those groups. I also recognise that a white person using the words for illustrative purposes is hugely different to a person of colour who is doing the same.

The editorial decision has been made to edit out that portion of the interview when it goes live in iPlayer/BBC Sounds and I’m planning on clipping the interview separately for our BBC Sounds page and will send you the link as soon as it’s up.

If you would like I would be happy to refer you to the Editor and Assistant Editor if you would like to discuss further – and I would sincerely like to thank you once again for your contribution – it made a real impact.

Jamie

Professor Augustine John
International Consultant & Executive Coach Visiting Professor  –  Coventry University
Honorary Fellow and Associate Professor The UCL Institute of Education – University of London

Phil Scraton reflects on Race Hate and its consequences

On By Tony TaylorIn PoliticsLeave a comment

In the light of a forthcoming play, which imagines what life might have been like for Anthony Walker, the 18 year old student, who 15 years ago was brutally murdered, Phil Scraton returns to a radio script he wrote 14 years ago. Its argument resonates vividly and painfully down the years.

Anthony: A Drama by Jimmy McGovern BBC 1 8.30pm 27 July 2020

Anthony Walker


RACE HATE

For several years I wrote and presented a scripted radio broadcast for Féile Radio in Belfast. Seven each a year, 90 minutes long, the script interspersed with music. What follows is the final section from the programme: The Roots of Race Hate broadcast in 2006. The programme opened with my experiences of working with the Irish Traveller Community on Everton Brow, Liverpool in the 1970s. In this extract I mentioned the murder of Anthony Walker:

‘At the beginning of this programme I recounted my experience of visiting Walsall in the aftermath of an unlawful eviction in which three young Irish Traveller children died. They were trapped inside a burning trailer dragged from its jacks by bailiffs.


At the time I struggled with unanswered questions:
• under whose authority could a local authority, using private bailiffs supported by the police, recklessly evict Traveller families in the dead of night, killing their children in the process?
• what kind of supposedly democratic, pluralist state – national and local – would sanction such acts of brutality?
• what kind of investigative system would deny that a grave crime had taken place?
• why was there no expression of public outrage, no media concern, no political condemnation?
• what kind of inquisitorial system would return verdicts of accidental death?
• why was academic research uninterested in researching and recording the experiences of Gypsies and Travellers?


Alongside these six key questions was what I called the Henry Reynolds’ question. Gypsies and Travellers had endured violent repression for generations. Why weren’t we told? As an active anti-racist, why didn’t I know?


In a typically lucid, moving and considered commentary on Rwanda the Irish journalist, Fergal Keane looks down from a bridge and sees two bodies, man and baby, caught in the rocks to the side of the river. He writes:
‘I saw that the child had been killed with a machete, a gash across its skull. It did not seem like a real child. It looked like a doll. Or perhaps it would be more truthful to say I did not want to accept that it was a child. I looked again and of course knew that further back along the river, perhaps fifty to one hundred miles further back, an adult had taken a knife and ended the life of this child and then hurled it into the water … I kept my eyes closed and gripping the rails of the bridge made my way back to the car in the manner of a blind man. I did not want to look back at the river, to see it ever again. And on the journey north to Kigali where the war still raged, I kept asking myself the same question: ‘what kind of a man would kill a baby. What kind of a man?’


Keane goes on to talk of genocide, of how in Africa ‘we almost invariably explain such a slaughter as a matter of tribalism’. Naively, he continues:
‘A crazy African thing. A horror somehow mitigated by the knowledge that Africans have always been prone to this kind of behaviour. Genocide prompted by implacable and ancient tribal antagonisms.’ Like many of his fellow journalists and photographers Keane had arrived in the midst of recurring massacre and migration. There was no shared consciousness of the ravages of colonial rule and the exploitation of cultural differences.He says, ‘I drove in from Uganda believing that the short stocky ones had simply decided to turn on the tall thin ones because that was the way it always had been.’


Scratch below the surface of this genocide and you find not a simple issue of tribal hatreds but a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity. Two years later, following his personal quest to understand the consequences of the brutal colonisation of Africa by competing European States and the protracted and bloody struggle for independence, Keane returned to his initial question, ‘What kind of man?’ he responds:
‘I think the answer is very different. What kind of man? Anyone, anyone at all. Not a psychopath, Not a natural born killer. A man born without prejudice or hatred … but a man who has learned hatred. A man like you and me.’

My research into deaths in custody in England reveals the depth of racism within the state and its institutions. Throughout the 1990s, custody deaths leading to unlawful killing or neglect verdicts at inquests represented the sharp end of the continuum of state violence directed towards Black people.
While brutality knows no hierarchy, the killing of Joy Gardner in July 1993, by officers of the Metropolitan Police extradition unit, exemplifies the impunity with which physical force can be directed towards those who resist arrest. She was bound with tape, her mouth gagged, dying of suffocation. Following her death it became apparent that black people featured disproportionately in the numbers of controversial deaths in custody. Oluwashiji Lapite, Brian Douglas, Leon Patterson, Wayne Douglas, Ibrahim Sey, Christopher Alder, Roger Sylvester, Sarah Thomas, Alton Manning and Kenneth Severin became familiar names mourned within Britain’s Black communities. Each died in custody, their families alleging neglect or brutality

As inquest verdicts of unlawful killing began to stack up, actively pursued by INQUEST, the United Nations Committee Against Torture produced a report on its extensive UK investigation into custody deaths. It concluded that a significant cause for concern was ‘the number of deaths in police custody and the apparent failure by the state party (UK) to provide an effective investigative mechanism to deal with allegations of police and prison authorities’ abuse’. Soon after this report was published the Police Complaints Authority stated that the police ‘have to ask themselves whether they are treating black and ethnic minority people as well as they would white people’. Coming in the wake of reassurances from all criminal justice agencies and the Home Office that the Macpherson Report’s recommendations had been implemented effectively, this was a significant indictment of police policy and practice.

In March 2000 the killing of Zahid Mubarek by his racist cell-mate in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution was a clear illustration of how, within an institution, racism can be ignored or even encouraged. Stops and searches, house raids and wrongful arrests, internment without trial and so on, together add to the experience of vulnerability in communities where institutionalised racism has a long and established history. Racism on the street draws support, even legitimacy, from institutionalised racism.

Anthony Walker died in Huyton, Liverpool just over a year ago. With his cousin, he walked his girlfriend to a bus stop. For no other reason than the colour of his skin he was on the receiving end of a torrent of racial abuse from a young man outside a pub. Frightened, the three walked quickly through the local park to another bus stop. But the racist and his mates jumped in a car and ambushed the three as they left the park. Anthony was left with an axe in his head. He died several hours later. In a climate of hate, to be different is enough to be a target.

To be Black or Asian, is to be other, to be an outsider. With racist attacks throughout England and Wales up six fold, in the current climate the deep seated racism that is Empire’s legacy has once again risen to the surface. And racist attacks are a regular feature of daily life throughout the island of Ireland. Abuse and assaults on the street, people firebombed from their homes, mosques and shrines desecrated. It is a climate of hate that emphasises already existing inequalities in a society that promotes the pretence of multiculturalism.

Working class Black and Asian communities understand all too well the meaning of economic marginalisation and social exclusion. They also understand the historical context of imperialism that treated their ancestors and their homelands as places to conquer, to enslave and to own.
And so it is with Travellers. Like Stephen Lawrence and Anthony Walker, Johnny Delaney was killed by racists in Ellesmere Port in 2003. Johnny was 15 and lived with his family on the Travellers’ site in Liverpool. He was attacked by a group of youths on a playing field. Knocked to the ground he was repeatedly kicked and one of his attackers stamped on his head with both feet. He said Johnny deserved the kicking ‘because he was only a fucking gypsy’. To his family and to witnesses the attack was undoubtedly racist. The Cheshire police investigated it as racially motivated. Two 16 year old boys were prosecuted for the killing. The judge, however, ruled that there was no racial motive for the attack. The boys were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to four and a half years.

Johnny’s father and mother, Patrick and Winifred, campaigned tirelessly to have the killing recognised as racist. The real concern remains that because Johnny was neither Black nor Asian his death could not be classed as racially motivated. Yet it is difficult to appreciate how the killing could be considered anything but the ultimate act of race hatred. The trial judge’s ruling exemplified how easy it is to take racism out of context, to remove it from the equation, thus denying its ever-present and all-pervasive reality.
Hate knows no hierarchy. Yet Gypsies, and Irish Travellers in particular, remain the most vilified of all ‘ethnic’ groups. They exist at the sharp end of the continuum of institutional and interpersonal racism. In the media they endure levels of racist abuse and stereotyping that would lead to immediate censure if directed against any other ethnic group.


Earlier this year Patrick Delaney died, campaigning to his last breath for justice and rights for Gypsies and Travellers. In the tributes to his work one stood out:
Patrick took every opportunity to challenge the inequalities that Gypsies and Travellers experience in the criminal justice system. He was destroyed by the lack of justice to such an extent that it killed him.

In understanding racist or sectarian violence and murder, the long history of colonial rule and the power it dispersed to its beneficiaries, at home as well as abroad, is central. Its legacy is racism, its currency is hatred and its consequences implicate us all.’

Corbyn and Anti-Semitism – Prof Gus John answers Archbishop Welby

On By Tony TaylorIn neoliberalism, Politics1 Comment

Back in 2015 Gus John took a breath at the age of 70, reflecting on fifty years of struggle. On the In Defence of Youth Work web site we observed, ‘Prof. Gus John arrived in the UK in August 1964, aged 19, to study for the priesthood. But almost from the moment he arrived he became involved in what was to become his life’s calling – education, youth work and the struggle for social justice and human rights for embattled communities as an activist and an academic.’

Thankfully Gus is still struggling and following his motto, ‘Do Right! Fear No One!’, he has resigned from his position on the Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns in protest at Archbishop Welby’s endorsement of the Chief Rabbi’s condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. I hope you will find time to engage with his coruscating rebuke to what might be called ‘the establishment at prayer’ and its damaging intervention into the most significant election for decades – see my ‘From Social Selfishness to Social Solidarity’.

Corbyn and Anti-Semitism 
Prof Gus John answers Archbishop Welby 

Of Stained-Glass Houses and Stones

On 26 November 2019, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, backed the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis in his condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, stating that Mirvis’ criticism of Corbyn and the Labour Party should ‘alert us to the deep sense of insecurity and fear felt by many British Jews’.  In response, Professor Gus John, independent consultant and a lay member of the Archbishops’ Council’s Committee on Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns (CMEAC)*wrote:

                                                                                                                                         

So, the jury has returned its verdict. 

Jeremy Corbyn has failed the fitness to practice test.  His fitness to lead the nation has been tested in his handling of complaints of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party and he has failed that test.  What is more, under his watch the Labour Party is suffering the ‘shame’ of being investigated by the government’s anti-discrimination watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.  

This is all most intriguing.  Let’s take a moment to dissect it.  Corbyn is considered unfit to lead a government because with him at the helm his party has failed to deal swiftly and decisively with the anti-Semitic conduct of a minute proportion of its members.  This has cause hurt among the Jewish population and alienated Jewish supporters of Labour. So, Corbyn is presumed to be guilty of ‘joint enterprise’, because although he himself is a committed anti-racist and against anti-Jewish racism, by implication he has colluded with those who are not by failing to act decisively against them.  As such, his is taken to be a failure of leadership in that he did not ensure that appropriate mechanisms existed within the Labour Party to deal with complaints of anti-Semitism in a timely fashion. But, the absence of such mechanisms and processes is an organisational and institutional issue. The matters being complained against and being investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission are ones which are to do mainly with the conduct of individuals, whether they are rank and file members of the Labour Party or people holding official positions in the party.

Why this distinction? It seems to me that what is missing in this whole hysterical discourse which sounds increasingly like populism on speed, is that discrimination against any group or population in society who are rendered outsiders and not quite considered integral to the body politic typically manifests in at least four observable ways:  structural, cultural, institutional and personal. In this case, the actions of individuals in the Labour Party and what those actions indicate about their attitudes to the Jewish community are considered to be indicative of an embedded culture of anti-Semitism within Labour, a culture presumably endorsed and sustained by Jeremy Corbyn, if only by his failure to deal with the people responsible for perpetuating it in a timely fashion.

So, the Chief Rabbi proclaims with all the authority that goes with his position that Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to lead a government of a country in which Jews that have been so let down by him have to continue not only to live but to be full citizens. The actions of people within the Labour Party whom he has failed to deal with have caused the entire Jewish community to have cause to look over their shoulders as they go about their daily business and the responsibility for that must be laid at Corbyn’s feet.  The sense I make of that is that combating racism and anti-Semitism will not be safe in Corbyn’s hands, so on 12 December, people should think carefully about what they do in the ballot box and let their conscience lead them, because if he has failed to do his duty by the Jewish community and to get that right, he surely cannot be trusted to get anything else right. The media on the other hand reacts to the Chief Rabbi as if he were the Pope, speaking for all British Jews as the Pope would for all Roman Catholics.  Secular Jews and those who do not hold with the views of Jews for Labour are considered not to matter.

It seems to me that the Chief Rabbi and those powerful figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury who have weighed in behind him are being more than a little sectarian and establishing a hierarchy of oppression if they seriously expect the entire nation to judge Corbyn and his capacity to run the country for the good of all its citizens on the basis of their assessment of his performance in dealing with anti-Semitism.

This is all happening at a time when, despite the government and the media focusing on Brexit as the only show in town, people’s lives are being lost and their fundamental rights being trampled upon as a direct consequence of the government’s hostile environment.  At a time when citizens of the African and Asian diaspora have to be constantly ‘looking over their shoulder’ for fear of being ambushed by border force apparatchiks, or by right wing vigilantes who appoint themselves as defenders of our country and its borders. At a time when employers, landlords, schools/colleges/universities, doctors surgeries, A & E departments and other health providers are being appointed without their say so as immigration officers and extensions of the UK’s border force under the Immigration Act 2016; when people who as young black men were harassed and criminalised by the police 40 years ago under the ‘Sus’ law are being told now that they are undocumented and they must leave the UK because they have a criminal record and have therefore forfeited their right to remain; when undocumented workers who having been denied benefits are having whatever earnings they derive from casual work confiscated as ‘proceeds of crime’; children being excluded from school for not having the proper uniform because they are being fed from food banks and their parents/carers cannot afford to buy the clothes and shoes that would make them compliant with the school’s uniform policy.  One could go on.  

I am not aware of the Chief Rabbi or/and the Archbishop of Canterbury alerting the nation to the quality of leadership that perpetrates and sustains such human rights violations.  I have been an external examiner for colleges and universities for the last forty years. I have lived in the UK since 1964. I am to attend an examining board next week where a student will be defending her PhD thesis and I have been given strict instructions to make sure and bring my passport to prove I have the right to work, or else I won’t be able to present my external examiner’s report.  

This is the state at structural level doing to sections of the population what the Chief Rabbi is accusing the leader of the Labour Party of being nonchalant about with respect to his party’s treatment of Jews.  If the number of deaths in custody that the African community has suffered for half a century without a single police officer being found guilty of murder or manslaughter had occurred within the Jewish community, by now the entire nation would have been brought to a standstill.   Given our interlocking histories on the axis of race, ethnicity and class in post-colonial Britain, no one group in the society has a monopoly on oppression, or on hurt.

And what gives the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to endorse the Chief Rabbi’s scaremongering about Corbyn and adopt such a lofty moral position in defence of the Jewish population?  I have often had cause to wonder how it is that Justin Welby was made Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than John Sentamu.  Sentamu consecrated Welby as Bishop of Durham in York Minster in October 2011. By November 2012, just one year after becoming a Bishop, it was announced that Justin Welby was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, though it was widely expected – in some circles at least – that Sentamu would get that post.  Sentamu was a highly respected black senior cleric and had been a Bishop since 1996 and Archbishop of York since 2005, six years before he consecrated Welby a Bishop. It may well be that the appointments committee prayed and fasted and sought divine revelation before making their choice, so let me not gainsay the workings of the Holy Spirit!  Be that as it may, if Anglicans in the UK from the African and Asian diaspora were to judge Justin Welby as the leader of the established church by the same criteria he appears to be employing in his assessment of Jeremy Corbyn, he too would fail the fitness to lead test. There are numerous reasons why Anglican clergy, laity and employees within the Anglican Church who are so-called black and ethnic minority don’t call out the Archbishop of Canterbury on racism in the church and its leadership, in the same way that he sees fit to join the orchestrated condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn.  Maybe, just maybe, he has now given them permission to do so. Those who occupy houses clad with stained glass should perhaps be a trifle more careful when they join others in throwing stones.

Professor Gus John – 26 November 2019

CMEAC RESIGNATION – PROF GUS JOHNDownload

In addition a copy of Prof Gus John’s resignation letter

If you are unfamiliar with Gus John’s history, you might find the following links revealing.

Reflections on the 1981 Moss Side 'Riots' : Gus John
Being Black & Dead While Excluded