If it wasn’t for the tragic loss of dozens of lives, the intellectual gymnastics which have followed the shootings in Norway would actually be quite funny. As it is, they’re just the icing on a particularly depressing cake. It’s not just the screeching u-turn the punditocracy (and the editorial staff at the Sun) performed after realising the attack wasn’t actually carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. It’s not even the way an atrocity magically stops being “terrorism” as soon as people realise it wasn’t masterminded by a bloke with brown skin and a beard. No, what really gets me is the blame game, and the glaring inconsistencies which get ignored on all sides as a result.

Over at LibCon, Adam Bienkov takes Boris Johnson to task for denying that Anders Behring Breivik’s rightwing political leanings had anything to do with his decision to carry out the shootings, pointing out the obvious discrepancy between his denial that rightwing anti-multicultural and anti-Islamic rhetoric were a causal factor in this case and his assertion in the Spectator in the wake of 7/7 that Islam – rather than a few isolated fanatics – were “the problem”. Now, if you were feeling charitable you could perhaps interpret Johnson’s assertion that “[Breivik] killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males” as a renunciation of his previous position, rather than evidence of inconsistency. If he has altered his views however, he clearly doesn’t have the gumption to make this change of heart explicit, so it seems fair to assume Bienkov’s right to criticise Johnson for this. The trouble is, Bienkov doesn’t really do so well in the consistency stakes himself.

The news that Breivik was a fan of Melanie Phillips and seems to have had links to the EDL is taken by Adam Bienkov as evidence that

“the hard-right ideology pushed by certain pundits in the press has questions to answer now…whilst we shouldn’t entirely blame right-wing ideologues for helping form those packs, we shouldn’t entirely absolve them from their responsibilities either”

…which is fair enough. Except that he’s also derisive of this now-notorious Jerusalem Post editorial which suggests that Breivik was motivated by an aversion to multiculturalism – a view which, the editorial makes clear, he shares with much of the mainstream Right across the Western world. So rightwing commentators in the mainstream media who are vocally opposed to multiculturalism and whom Breivik admired shouldn’t be “entirely absolved” from responsibility for his actions, but suggesting that his actions are an expression of discontent with multiculturalism is a disgraceful attempt to make political capital out of a tragedy? Please. We can do better than this.

Here’s what we need to remember. First, when someone performs a voluntary action, there’ll be a number of reasons why they do so. Those reasons might be good or bad (morally or otherwise), as might the action itself. Seeking to explain the reasons for a morally reprehensible action is not the same thing as justifying or excusing it, whether the person performing that action is an Islamic fundamentalist or a far-right Christian. Second, when someone writes something that motivates someone else to do something terrible that the writer wouldn’t condone, how far the writer is responsible for the actions of their more deranged violently fanatical readers is pretty much impossible to state with any certainty. Any attempt to do so is almost inevitably going to be coloured by one’s ideological leanings. Is Marx responsible for the gulags? Hayek for sweatshops, or the murders of trade unionists in Latin America? Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition? The Prophet Muhammad for 9/11? It’s easy to be self-righteous when it’s not your set of cherished values being called into question, but it doesn’t do much to advance the debate.

[Edited to remove a pejorative term related to mental illness, in response to this article]

TTE readers will probably be aware of the ‘It Gets Better’ internet campaign against homophobic bullying. This was started by the brilliant American sex advice columnist Dan Savage, reacting to the suicide of Billy Lucas, a fifteen-year old gay teenager who hanged himself after suffering intense homophobic abuse from his peers. His mission statement: “I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes…I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.” He posted this video on Youtube with his partner and since then the thing has, rather wonderfully, caught on.

The campaign gained real notoriety when Barack Obama submitted his own ‘It Gets Better’ video and David Cameron has followed his example (watch it here.)

Dan Savage, though grateful, offered the following criticism:

David Cameron isn’t the first straight politician who has told bullied LGBT kids to go to their parents for support. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi—practically every straight politician who’s made an IGBP [It Gets Better Project] video has said the same thing: go and ask mom and dad for help.

Between twenty and forty percent of homeless teenagers are LGBT kids and most of these homeless LGBT kids were thrown out of their homes when they came out or were outed to their families…Bullied LGBT kids should be encouraged to reach out, to find help, to seek support. But that support, sadly, can’t always be found at home.

I have my own reservations. Firstly, the video very quickly turns into a rather soppy promotional video for modern, tolerant Britain (with opportunities for British viewers to wince when Cameron reminds viewers of his commitment to ‘fairness’). The ‘It Gets Better’ campaign was intended to be of comfort to any gay teenager suffering from abuse - there have been IGBP videos from lots of countries and in several languages; thus a gay fifteen-year old from some American backwater won’t get much from this. Cameron also refers to civil partnerships and recent Equality legislation as examples of how we’ve moved forward – forgetting to mention that these are Labour policies, opposed by his Conservative Party.

And the criticism of Obama’s IGBP message also applies to Cameron – politicians have the power to actually make things better. Just as Obama has yet to fulfill his promises on gay equality (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, DOMA, gay marriage etc) Cameron hasn’t actually proposed any measures to combat homophobia in schools, something well within his power.

But this is still bloody significant, and Cameron should be commended. As Dan Savage pointed out, “this is the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. Try to picture a Republican politician making an IGBP video—not one that I’m aware of has—much less the leader of the GOP.”

Take a train to Wickford, Essex, and then drive for a half an hour beyond the edge of the town, and you come to Dale Farm, the biggest traveller site in the country. There are almost 100 families now living on the site, half of them in small, semi-permanent chalets, the rest in caravans. A group of us went up there on Thursday, to help out with the campaign to save Dale Farm, and to show solidarity with the community there.

After waiting at the train station, we were eventually picked up by Martin from one of the local churches. The Travellers are mainly Irish Catholics, and once the Catholic church in Wickford had become involved, a few of the other congregations chimed in as well. Driving through the country lanes, his leather driving gloves neatly clutching the wheel of his Merc, Martin filled us in on the local area. ‘It’s mainly the papers who tell people what to think about the site. That, and the Tory council.’

Dale Farm has been a traveller site for over ten years now, and there have been several threats of eviction over that time. The last time it looms strong in people’s memories is 2005, but this time there’s a difference. Over the past couple of weeks, the nearby site at Hovefields has been evicted, leaving only a few families untouched, living in fear of being moved on at any time. The local paper, the Basildon Echo, had printed a vile front page and editorial the day we were there. ‘Traveller family does the right thing’ it declared victoriously, and continued with a turd of a comment-piece praising the family on the ‘reasonableness.’ Never did it cross the printed page that the sight of people digging up and demolishing their own homes is a sight of people fleeing out of fear.

Once at the site itself, almost all the residents we met were women, the men having left for work. The gender divisions in the community are deeply entrenched, and on more than one occasion we found ourselves confronted with an uncomfortable level of sexism. Sometimes we challenged it; mostly we let it go. Similarly, I think the travellers found us pretty strange at times, understanding that we were there to try and help, but not exactly how.

The Tory council claim that the travellers are a nuisance, and the paper says they’re in their neighbours’ ‘back garden’, but what I saw was nothing like that. The higgledy-piggledy concrete patch which is home to this community is far away from anyone else. Perhaps we could try and see the area as a long-standing experiment in social housing, taking an ex-scrap heap and turning it into a fully functioning, close-knit community. On one side are green fields kept for ponies, which occassionally escape and gallop around the rubbish-strewn internal roads.

We split into two groups: some to write documentation and help individual families with legal support and to make sure they could received legal aid; the rest of us to talk to some of the community about plans to resist an eviction. One of them, cup of tea in one hand, and fag in the other, looked at me through squinted eyes and explained that when the time came, they’d know what to do. It’s not just her traveller pride at having faced such adversity before but rather, a sense that a traveller can do anything. ‘We learn just like that’ she said, with a click of the fingers.

Each family owns a plot, which is demarcated by a low brick wall and, more often than not, a large cast iron gate. Some of the empty plots have bicycle locks wrapped around the black metal bars, or cement poured over the ground to keep people from claiming the plot as their own. All the land is legally owned by the travellers – but only half of them have planning permission, and it’s this point which the local council want to use as an excuse to evict the families.

‘The council say they want to put us in houses. What a cheek, no? I mean, excuse me, I have my own mind!’ Our new guide is wagging her finger and swaying her body while she shouts, with a parodic diva-like campness. Forget wooden carts and gold hooped earrings: she’s standing outside her caravan, dressed like any mum I see around London, and never more so when the children arrive back from the local school all together in a bus. She tries to explain to us, in her thick rolling Irish accent, what remains in traveller life. How she’s afraid of living in houses, of the sounds that houses make. Of sleeping alone, rather than 3 or 4 to a bed. And of how much they want to stay where they are.

‘I wanna go down to London, to that big home, the one they have for all them dogs. You know the one, in Battersea, where they keep all the dogs and give them showers, rooms, and keep them all nice and cosy. All the lovely homes for the dogs. They can sort the right kind of housing for the dogs, but not for us. Well, I’m gonna go chuck all them doggies outta their homes down in Battersea!’

Later this month,a  test case will go to court, and the family in question will either be given new land on which to live, or the council will try and rehouse them. If this happens, they will be given an eviction notice, and the bailiffs will arrive a month later.

After our work’s done, we sit in the sun, three deck chairs and lots of scruffy dogs for company. Our guide asks whether we’ve enjoyed our day of gypsy life, ‘a little bit of gypo’ as she put it. Well, we did, and I’ll be going back to make sure these families feel the solidarity they deserve.

With housing lists constantly increasingly, and prices always on the rise, there don’t seem to be many things as nonsensical as removing families forcibly from their homes. As we’ve seen with the treatment of Roma in France, and the rising Islamaphobia across Europe, we live in a time when scapegoating is becoming dangerously prevalent. Let’s ensure that this persecuting mentality doesn’t reduce Dale Farm to an empty area of concrete and scrap, one that wouldn’t do anyone any good at all.

This week’s overturning of Proposition 8 in California is obviously welcome news. Amending California’s state constitution to state that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” is nakedly discriminatory and Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike it down should be applauded.

There is, though, something else that’s important to note about this case; it’s a clear example of a member of the judiciary overriding the democratically expressed will of the people. Proposition 8 was put to a referendum at the same time as the 2008 Presidential election, and 52% voted yes – a slim but clear majority. Judge Walker’s decision was unambiguously anti-democratic. Stopping same-sex couples from marrying is wrong for many reasons, but one area on which it certainly doesn’t impinge is democratic rights. And what this demonstrates, I suggest, is that the revolutionary left vision of a society run as democratically as possible might not be without serious drawbacks.

For a liberal, there are certain universal individual rights and liberties which merit legal protection regardless of what majority opinion might be. The right of two (or more, as I argue here) consenting adults to access all the legal benefits of marriage if they so choose is, in my opinion, worthy of this protection, so as a social (though definitely not an economic) liberal I’m entirely comfortable with Judge Walker’s decision. But for the revolutionary left, one of the many benefits which the overthrow of capitalism will bring is more democracy, and in particular more direct democracy, in as many areas of life as possible. Our present system of representative parliamentary democracy is argued to be little more than a sham; a tool to safeguard the interests of the rich and powerful – and the same (presumably) goes for undemocratic checks on legislative power like the judiciary. But given what’s happened with Prop 8, and with other cases where good reforms were passed in the teeth of popular opposition (Roy Jenkins’ abolition of capital punishment and his decriminalisation of abortion and male homosexual sex in the 1960s are often cited as examples), it seems hard to argue that public opinion always knows best.

I’m aware, of course, that the revolutionary left’s advocacy of more democracy doesn’t entail believing that democratic decisions are always right. A Marxist, might, for example, argue that people can act or vote in ways antithetical to their own interests or those of their class because the true nature of economic relations under capitalism is obscured, which leads to false consciousness, and that in a communist society this wouldn’t happen. But with social issues like tolerance towards sexual minorities it seems a little hard to argue that capitalism must necessarily foment bigotry, not least because it’s hard to see precisely how stirring up homophobia or racism benefits the ruling class in and of itself. Apart from anything else, one of the major arguments used by opponents of Prop 8 was that legalising same-sex marriages would bring money into California’s economy (see this video from 2:03 onwards, for example) – something you’d think the bourgeoisie would generally be in favour of. So, assuming we’re agreed that equal rights for sexual minorities are worth safeguarding regardless of what majority opinion might be on the matter, and assuming that homophobic attitudes can’t just be put down to the distorting effects of capitalism, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that those pesky liberal checks and balances on democracy are pretty important.

I’m aware that there’s a real danger that what I’m arguing here could come off as elitist. Maybe it is. But I’d rather live in an elitist liberal society where unpopular but harmless minorities are undemocratically protected from the tyranny of the majority than in a totally democratic commune with no safeguards against bigotry. Maybe that’s a false dichotomy, but like any other decision-making process, democracy is and will always be fallible. I’m aware that my knowledge of revolutionary socialist and anarchist theory is severely limited, and anyone who can explain why I’m wrong about this is more than welcome to do so. But unless and until that happens I’ll remain firmly of the belief that more democracy isn’t always something to be welcomed.

Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still deeply entrenched”. Now, two schools – one 90+% white, one 90+% asian – are to be merged next month in a dramatic effort to ease racial tension in an area in which proximity is no guarantee of community.

This is the subject of a Newsnight series entitled ‘Crossing the Line’, and the report aired last night shows something quite revealing about race relations in some parts of our country. (You can watch it here, if you can sit through ten minutes of thick northern accents).

In the report we meet Jean as she drops her thirteen year old daughter, Hannah, off to drama club (which requries a commute through the predominantly asian part of the town). Jean admits that she feels ‘uncomfortable’ doing this, even for a few minutes when shielded in a large metal box on wheels. ‘In Oldham there isn’t a community anymore’, she says.

Hannah’s views are a bit more strident. “People have been saying that they’re going to build better houses for asians an’ that, immigrants an’ that. It’s like they can just come into the country and get treated like they’re kings and queens…and we get treated like we’re nothing”.

This is a common view, especially, it seems, among the young. Said one boy from the majority-white school, ‘Over there, it’s like totally different; it’s, like, Muslim culture’. The feelings are returned, certainly, and the animosity of the ‘other’ side forms the worldview of the very young. One asian girl, about ten, said simply, ‘They don’t like us asians’. Impressions formed the in the minds of the young can hard to dislodge.

These impressions can only be maintained with extreme seperateness. (Remember, the BNP performs best in areas with little or no immigration).

There have been concerns that the students to be integrated are too old, and that the project will backfire. These concerns I won’t address. What I would like to focus on is the vacuous little objection always raised whenever a humane policy is proposed. The accusation is that the government is just engaging in ‘Social Engineering’

Let’s examine this twaddle.

It might seem to make sense at first. The governemt – cynically, we can presume – is engaging in policies to force certain people in society into different positions etc. (‘Ticking boxes’ one person called it in the above case.) It does this to produce certain politically correct goals, and in callous disregard for the people involved.

Picture it: There he is, the faceless, ‘rationalising’ bureaucrat, manipulating people against their will to satisfy some politically expedient goal, and to make liberals and vegetarians feel better.

Do people realise what they’re saying when they make these kinds of hollow objections, use these hollow words? Society is not a ‘natural’ thing. It is based on human institutions and human agreements which we can control. If we deem equality to be a good thing, we can implement policies to encourage equality; just as we can pursue policies to produce more millionaires. Each produces dramatic social consequences. The abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women could be described in this manner, but would we call them ‘social engineering’? We should never tolerate the idea that social relations are the outcome of human nature; more often than not they are the result of some design.

So the definition I’ve come to is this:

Social Engineering: Humane policies with which I disagree, and to which I have no morally acceptable objection.

This cry of ‘Social Engineering!’ carries with it, I think, a rather depressing worldview in which we cannot attempt to change society for the better without government failure and ill effect. Nonsense – society should be ours to engineer.

Let’s hope for the success of this schools program, and look forward to the communities of Oldham coming together in the light of day to see their common humanity. And from that glorious point on they can address their real problem: the fact that they live in Oldham.

If you get the Independent you might have read Christina Patterson’s invective against her Orthodox Jewish neighbours in Stamford Hill. In an article entitled “The Limits of Multi-Culturalism” Patterson pours out all her gripes against the community. She would like, she tells us, “to teach my neighbours some manners”:

I would like, for example, to say to the man who drove the wrong way up a one-way street on Sunday night, while chatting away on his mobile phone, and to the man who nearly backed into me yesterday, while also chatting on his mobile phone… that while they clearly enjoy the art of conversation, it’s one that doesn’t combine brilliantly with driving.

I would like to say to the man from whom I bought some paper cups, and who handled my money as if it had been dipped in anthrax, that it wouldn’t kill him to say “please” or “thank you”.

I would like to say to all these people that I don’t care if they wear frock-coats, and funny suits and hats covered in plastic bags, and insist on wearing their hair in ringlets (if they’re male) or covered up by wigs (if they’re female), but I do think they could treat their neighbours with a bit more courtesy and just a little bit more respect.

When I moved to Stamford Hill, 12 years ago, I didn’t realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention. I didn’t realise… that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn’t been chosen by God

Comparing a whole bunch of shopkeepers who happen to be of a particular religious persuasion to a group of murderous Neo-Nazis is a bit strong to say the least. Equally, connecting somebody’s failure to observe parking restrictions with their jewishness, via the old “chosen people” chestnut,  suggests an iron determination to frame bad behaviour as Jewish behaviour.

I would be tempted to write this off as a stupidly written, slightly bigoted article, but there is acutally something darker and more pernicious about the way in which she others the local hasidic community. That she frames so many very mundane human failings – from inconsiderate driving, to rudeness on the bus, to not saying thankyou – as an outgrowth of her neighbours’ Judaism, suggests that she is not capable of engaging with them as human beings who happen to follow a certain faith; rather their orthodox judaism is the essence, the beiginning and the end, of who they are and what they do.

In the same way she appears to percieve each particular hasidic Jew, not as an individual but as a mere specimen of their clan. Thus in her list of gripes against the hasidic community she tells us of “the fishmonger who asked my (black) friend whether he really wanted to buy some fish from his shop”. This single example of anti-black racism  during her 12 years in Stamford Hill (judging by the tone of her article she would almost certainly not be keeping any more  up her sleeve) hardly marks the local community out as atypical in England. Neither is such an occurrence unimaginable in the WASPier parts of Surrey. Yet the sins of this one bad fishmonger are projected onto the entire community. In short, this is dehumanising.

Further on in the article Christina flows on to female circumcisions and bad Muslims before showing her true, ugly nativism when she laments that:

A properly civilised society would accept that while lovely little C of E schools were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws, you can’t have them without having the madrassa run by the mad mullah next door, and therefore, sadly, you can’t have either.  [my emphasis]

In short, she does not, like many of us, have a principled commitment to secular education. She is merely saddened that schools cannot promulgate the  lovely and decent English religion (and in the process scare the shit out of millions of kids who happen to be gay) without opening the door to repulsive foreign beliefs.

Anyway, in contrast Christina Patterson’s treatment of her neighbours, I would like to extend to her the courtesy of engaging with her not as a specimen but as an individual. As such I would like to state for the record that her tendency write like an utter idiot, and her inability to get to perceive her neighbours as anything more differentiated than a mush of weird Jews, has nothing whatsoever to do with her being a gentile. Like the man who didn’t say please or thank you to her, some people are just pricks.

A while ago I criticised Peter Tatchell for calling for statutory regulation of the press – or in other words state censorship. Yet he has got it absolutely right on the recent conviction of an evangelical preacher for speaking against homosexuality. Tatchell writes:

The conviction and £1,000 fine imposed on a homophobic Christian street preacher in Glasgow must be condemned [as] an attack on free speech and a heavy-handed, excessive response to homophobia. Shawn Holes, an American Baptist evangelist touring Britain, was fined £1,000 for telling passers-by in Glasgow city centre:

“Homosexuals are deserving of the wrath of God – and so are all other sinners – and they are going to a place called hell.”

In court, he admitted breaching the peace on 18 March by “uttering homophobic remarks” that were “aggravated by religious prejudice”.

Mr Holes is obviously homophobic and should not be insulting people with his anti-gay tirades. He should be challenged and people should protest against his intolerance. However, in a democratic, free society it is wrong to prosecute him. Criminalisation is not appropriate.

The price of freedom of speech is that we sometimes have to put up with opinions that are objectionable and offensive.

My emphasis.

It’s an election year. Which means it’s time for the Conservatives to attack their favourite victimised minority. For such a tiny minority in British society, Travellers certainly attract a disproportionate amount of Middle England’s ire. Not content with passing the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, which removed the requirement for local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies, the Tories have continued to hound this vulnerable and socially excluded group for no reason other than that they are a convenient and popular target. Five years ago, Michael Howard launched a media campaign to repeal the Human Rights Act in an effort to prevent Travellers from applying for retrospective planning permission. Now the party is banging that same drum, seeking this time to replace the HRA with a British Bill of Rights.

The one sliver of a silver lining in all of this is that the green paper suggests compensating councils for new caravan sites. However, if the concerns of local people angry at squatters are to be met, whilst respecting the rights, freedoms and dignity of Gypsies, then councils must once again be required to provide sites for Travellers. It is a common misconception that Travellers like to travel. The Roma and Irish Gypsies I spoke to whilst working on a documentary for Indymedia all reported that whilst the road was ‘in their blood’, they desired to settle, build links with the local communities, send their children to local schools and take up paid employment. This, they reported, was consistently hampered by authorities attempting to evict them from their sites.

Of the Travellers I spoke to, most said they maintained good relations with the local population. The only hostility they came up against was from the council – where three BNP members had recently been elected – and from the media. Much of the reporting on Gypsies in the right-wing tabloids is nothing short of legitimised racism. Replace the word Gypsy with Black, Asian or Jewish and the headlines would be instantly unprintable. The first step to answering the Traveller Question has to be in providing decent, legal sites for them to stay. The second, countering the misconceptions, lies and outright prejudices of wider society, will take much longer.

The proposed equality bill has generated much debate – in particular the question of whether churches should be banned from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation. Yet what strikes me is the sheer hypocrisy of these measures, from a government which has actively institutionalised such discrimination.

Under laws that went into force last year, the new Independent Safeguarding Authority has the power to ban people from working with children, or to throw them out of their jobs if they are already doing so. People can be banned from working with children simply on the grounds of ‘unsuitability’, regardless of whether they have broken the law. Over on the ISA’s website you will find the list of criteria that case-officers use to decide whether somebody is unsuitable. Under the guidelines, people can potentially be banned from working with kids on the basis that they have an interest in violent porn, even if the material they possess doesn’t reach the threshold for criminal prosecution. Apparently, while discrimination against gay people should be illegal, discrimination against the BDSM community is not only fine but necessary.

Equally officers are expected consider whether the subject displays signs of a “concerning paraphilia”. This is a phrase so vague that it should frighten any freedom loving person. A “paraphilia” refers to any form of sexual desire that departs from the “normal” . What makes a particular paraphilia “concerning” is anybody’s guess. The important thing is that 40 years ago homosexuality could reasonably have been placed under this category. Most people DID find it concerning. Such a guideline potentially rules out anybody whose tastes are odds with prevailing social and sexual norms. Thus, while the government harps on about equality, it continues to support an institution which can ruin people’s lives on account of nothing more than their sexual orientation.