I.

What follows is an account of one of the most politically interesting nights I have experienced. At 6.30pm on Wednesday, I arrived in Deptford High Street for a demonstration of unity, called by an assembly which had met the night before. An odd collection of local leftists and community activists, along with various other trade unionists and odd-balls, amassed around the Anchor at one end of Lewisham’s main stretch.

The demonstration was not to condemn or condone the riots, but ‘to march against the cuts that caused the riots.’ At the front of the march for much of it, and hounding around mainly predictable speeches at the start and finish was a shouting white man, barking that we needed to show working class organisation and discipline, to provide ‘leadership to the community’ – to show that protest could happen without rioting.

We processed along the road, the police conveniently closing it for us. We held a couple of banners, one of them the large black and red of the South London Solidarity Federation. We shouted ‘cut back, fightback’, various ‘no ifs, no buts’ about public service cuts (especially when going past the fire house) and the strange ‘Blame the government, not our kids.’ Often, with more passion: ‘No justice, no peace’ – but, with the police presence, not the follow up line (‘fuck the police’).

The police themselves concentrated on the front and back of the demo. There were various police cars and vans around the roads, which have become standard over the past couple of nights of police-rule, and while a car kept watch on the front of the protest, three cavalry tailed the back. A scattering of officers walked along the sides. Still, we had plenty of room to move about.

Only at one point was there any tension with the police; they seemed to be holding the march up for no reason outside the Islam centre. After talking with a policeman, I found out that they believed there was tension between our demonstration and the Muslims outside the centre, and that we had been ‘squaring up to them’. In truth, many people on the demo were calling to the centre’s members to ‘join us’, to become part of the unity demonstration. To show that solidarity, a few people (I believe misguidedly, though not wrong) began chanting ‘Free free Palestine!’. The local coppers, however, didn’t realise that this was an attempt at solidarity. In fact, on questioning, I found that the policeman believed the chant to be a racist jibe of some kind. The police, clearly, had no idea who we were, what our politics were, or why we were demonstrating.

Actually, I can’t blame them. It was extremely difficult to answer this question – even though it seemed like an obvious march in which to participate. It is not the case that the scenes were overdetermined, but simply that they were indeterminate. I am white, and marching with 100 other folk the vast majority of whom were white as well, it was easy to mistake us for the fascists, or some other petit bourgeois manifestation. We were remarkably white. The symbols of our demo were the anarchist black, or hippiness and hipsterness or flat-cap, white working class militancy. Only later did I realise quite how white we must have looked, marching through Lewisham centre, so eerily quiet in the quasi-lock down that has swept through London these past couple of nights.

II.

On the way back from the demo, the streets now dark and empty, our bus swung over the hill towards Lewisham College – at which point we saw a group of around 30 black men were being essentially kettled by the police on the street, three police vans and two cars parked up. We pinged the bell, shot off the bus, and dashed back down the road.

Black unity demonstration stopped by police

A few of us had legal support materials, so we managed to hand those out – though it was more of a gesture of solidarity than a practical crutch. It helped us make friends though, even while we had to dodge between some police to do so. The coppers then wanted us to move away a bit, chatting asinine rubbish about the bad influence we might have – by telling people their rights. I moved to the other side of the street and watched, occasionally standing up to intervene with the police’s harassment of someone standing in the road. At one point the police did imply that they wanted us to leave, as the presence of white people at a distance might make ‘some people’ think that there was racial tension in the area. This from the 30 white, baton-wielding police surrounding the 30 hooded black men.

Some more people started to trickle into the residential street, and eventually the police got the go ahead from HQ to escort the group on its way. We walked on the other side of the road, in parallel with the black men – until a couple of them hollered us over. Chanting ‘peaceful march’, they wanted to stop the division between black and white. So we joined in.

Being enveloped into the police ‘bubble’ (a moving kettle), was a privilege. Now, we could talk. The group of friends, from all over Lewisham (it’s a big borough), had decided to show that ‘not all black people are looters’, and to protect their community from the EDL. News had reached them that there were hundreds of EDL supporters in Eltham, about one hour’s walk away. Concerned that the EDL might make their way up to Lewisham and Catford, the group were marching down there.

There were some important differences between the demonstration we were now on, and the one we had participated in earlier that evening. Though the black demo was perhaps a third of the size of the white demonstration, the it was encircled by police, who kept the pace up and pushed along the back at more than a quick walk. Harassing black men, as we all know now, is a favourite past time of the London Metropolitan police. We were told that we weren’t being detained or stopped. Nonetheless, we were both contained fairly tightly within the circle of police, and were also periodically stopped and made to wait for uncommunicated reasons. I can only speculate as to whether the presence of a hand full of white supporters made any difference to the police’s behaviour.

Another difference was the chanting – the black demo had only one chant: ‘Peaceful march, peaceful march; We’re protecting our community, we’re protecting our community.’ It was a more simple, clearer message than the variety of socialisms barked out earlier.

More striking, however, were the similarities. Both demonstrations were predominantly young adults. We took almot identical routes. Of paramount important, both were indeterminate. The black demo passed by shops and was also met with a questioning gaze, sometimes fearful, while our new friends shouted at the shop keepers ‘We’re here to protect you!’. While the police and some of the local working class population had seen us and thought we might be an all-white localist mob of the worst kind, those same people were concerned that we were now a group of looters, being escorted by the police.

Indeed, in several conversations I got the impression that the earlier unity demonstration had actually been interpreted by some of the black demonstrators and their friend as an EDL march through town; our worst fears confirmed.

After marching all the way through town, we stopped where earlier in the day the white demo had had a rally. This time, we sat around, and had a good chance to talk about things, and make some new friends. The police turned up with a book of spotter cards, and some reinforcements. But I guess it was late and dark, so they decided we should go back. Tired, and still surrounded by police, we sloped all the way back up the high street and the hill. As the police eventually, rather arbitrarily, decided they had had enough, we were told ‘You’re free to go’ and then, added hesitantly – ‘as you were all along.’

III.

There are some important lessons to be learnt and question to be asked here.

First, it is absolutely imperative that we, black and white, make practical moves to be understood clearly as calling for unity, solidarity, anti-racism and for an egalitarian politics. It we don’t do this, we risk being misunderstood by our allies, and conceived as the enemies we both oppose.

This is unfortunately, easier said than done. It can’t mean bringing out the hammer and sickles; certainly not in the context of the Eastern European population in London. I would hope that our forms of action can speak louder than our words and internet-circulated statements, but this too requires careful thought. What does active solidarity mean right now, and how does it engage with the undeniable complexity of the riots, without trying to resolve that complex?

Secondly, I think both demonstrations showed the almost total lack of working class and community organisations in London. A friend of mine says that back in the 1970s, an incident like the past few nights would have had an immediate response from hundreds of community groups across the capital. The black community no longer has such groups, and there have been only a handful of meetings. The only organisations that may have the ability to call such cross-generational – and also cross-community – meetings, are the churches. But they have remained silent. We will do well, I feel, to keep asking what the historical reasons for this are. (This also might explain why the politics of community groups are so unknown to London’s younger population, including the police). I am told that years ago, the local police would have known who the local political groups were, what they represented, and what they were trying to achieve. That South London SolFed were thought a threat to the Islam centre is not only worrying, but historically interesting.

Finally, last night’s demonstrations acted as a useful benchmark of the problems and hopes inherent in this kind of unity. With any luck, the friendships we formed last night will provide some small opportunity to bring together some of the black and white residents in Lewisham who want to undertake similar shows of unity and defence of their community from both rioters, and the police.

For Lewisham folk, there’s an assembly at 1pm at the Lewisham Clocktower on Saturday, to discuss ways forward. For North Londoners, the demonstration on Saturday, called by anti-cut groups and the Turkish/Kurdish community centres – the only working class organisations with the politics and responsiveness to have met and called such a demo in Hackney – will be of no small importance. If that gap between black and white can be bridged, and a politics of solidarity and anti-fascism can be communicated to all those who see, join and comment on the demonstration, then we might be able to begin reforming the kinds of community and labour organisations we will need over the years ahead.

P. S. If someone has a photograph of the first demo, I’d like to put one in this piece, so I’d be grateful if you could tweet it @thethirdestate

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]

On Saturday, a little bleary eyed from a party the night before, I went and marched with the Campaign for Justice for Smiley Culture.

Smiley Culture (born David Emmanuel) was a star before I was born. Half Guyanese, half Caribbean, Smiley became an early success story from the Afro-Caribbean music scene of South London. Pick up a CD compilation of British reggae and you’ll find his name on there. His music career didn’t bring riches though, and he became a businessman – apparently inspired by the wheeler dealers of the East End. However, just after his 48th birthday, Smiley was killed. During a police raid at his house in Surrey, he suffered a stab wound to the chest, and died.

The police claim that the knife wound was self-inflicted. However, as the Pan-Afrikan Society Community Forum puts it: “Either you believe Smiley stabbed himself or that he was stabbed by one of the police officers present. Based on the testimonies of those that knew Smiley best coupled with the fact that he had everything to live for, [we] take the position that he was murdered by the police.” As do many others.

Smiley Culture, performing in 1985

I went on the demo because I was inspired by a post at Top Soil on why those arrested at Fortnum and Mason on March 26th (which include a number of my friends) should show solidarity with the Campaign, and also because I was involved with the G20 protests in 2009, and remember well the circumstances of Ian Tomlinson’s death.

Many of the marchers on Saturday were also there to protest against other deaths in police custody or at the hands of the police directly: Kingsley Burrell Brown, Julian Webster, Sean Rigg, Jean Charles de Menezes, Brian Douglas, Shiji Lapite, Derrek Bennet, Azelle Rodney, Terry Nicholas and many others.

The crowd was predominantly Afro-Caribbean, and when speakers referred to ‘the community’, my feeling was that it was that community which was meant. I don’t have a problem with this. I think it’s fine to feel like an outsider at someone else’s demo; if I’m marching in solidarity, it’s still powerful if I say ‘your community has this problem, and I want it to stop too, because in some small way, I understand.’ My experience of the police as a political activist has meant that I have known small sporadic moments of the state’s violent intrusion: still, nothing like the systematic violent hammering which many parts of London’s black community sustains, along with many other racial communities in London.

This isn’t the same as a knee-jerk response for ‘unity’. While it was an event that was open to all, certain communities were more represented than others: it was, as I said, a mainly Afro-Caribbean demo, and not one which visibly brought in the Somalian, Ghanaian, Nigerian communities, etc. Similarly, the Africanism did not overtly extend to those most revolutionary parts of North Africa at the moment: Libya, Egypt and Tunisia still remain firmly in ‘the middle east’ it seems. This is not a critique of diversity, but a move away from the bland catch-all term of unity, and instead a recognition that certain communities are at this moment engaged in certain struggles.

The demonstration was very different from any I have been on. The mood was at times celebratory, of the show of strength and determination – around 2,500 people gathered on Wandsworth Road and marched to New Scotland Yard – and also anger and passion. The pace was quick, and the placards weren’t resting on people’s shoulders but held out in front, and high. One I kept spotting said ‘CPS: Shame on you’ and another ‘Underpoliced as victims; overpoliced as citizens.’

As well as Socialist Worker placards, a banner from the Lambeth anti-cuts group and a small swarm of obligatory paper sellers from a range of far Left groups (all of whom had been building for this demo admirabley), there were also people selling the Whirlwind newspaper, the official publication of the Alkebulan Revivalist movement, and leaflets going round for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal. The stewards wore a mixture of plain fluorescent vests, as well as a fair few with PCS, RMT and TUC logos. There were also the unwelcome bright green tabards of Liberty volunteers, there (by their own account) to both watch the police, and to make notes of any demonstrators who veered off the permitted route.

The stewards were quite shouty – several times they stopped the crowd to ensure that everyone (including journalists) was behind the bereaved family members. But this wasn’t unwelcome. There was a sense that the crowd wanted to be firm and close, to be a force that could be reckoned with. When we passed underneath a steel bridge just before Vauxhall, the noise was deafening, as people shouted, hollered, whistled and yelped, all the noises echoing back down to the ground. Through all the noise you could, of course, still here the extraordinary thumping amps booming back at you, and beneath it all a strung out, eerie remix of ‘Give Peace A Chance.’

Music, aptly, formed the atmosphere. In 1984 Smiley brought out two records which both stormed the charts. The first of these was Cockney Translation, in which Smiley recounts the story of both cockney rhyming slang and Jamaican patois, all through his thick Caribbean accent. As we turned round Westminster Abbey, I could here it being played on a tiny amp, its bass being absorbed into the crowd along with the noise of honking cars. Alternating between the two slangs, and explaining what they mean only by reference to eachother, the song is a very conscious statement of London multiculturalism as a fact of life, and also a celebration of its working class texture.

As we moved towards Victoria, I progressively bumped into more friends from various political groups and movements, most of them young and white, there to show solidarity. We were also often the youngest adults in the crowd, as well as marked aside by our colour. At New Scotland Yard, the crowd funnelled into the narrow street, and I was privileged to hear some extraordinary speeches. Merlin Emmanuel, Smiley’s nephew, truly rallied and encouraged the crowd. He listed the five demands the family have made of the Metropolitan Police, including the immediate suspension of any officer who has someone die while in their custody, and the recognition of the partiality of the ‘Independent’ Police Complaints Commission.

Beyond these demands (for which a mass petition is being organised), there was a real feeling that more had to be done. Merlin shouted that we ‘will march everyday’ if that’s what it takes to stop the police from killing. Kingsley Burrell Brown’s sister, in an incredibly emotional and fiercely angry speech shouted near the end ‘Brixton police station, I’m coming for you’. And you could tell she meant it, with us or on her own. When Merlin mentioned the Brixton riots of ten years back, he immediately compared those fires to a more important fire that burns now, ‘a spiritual fire’. At this parts of the crowd shouted and cheered in a way which reminded me of the centrality and important of Christianity in the lives of so many people there.

But, in the end, I think it isn’t the church or the petition which will be the face and future of this campaign. I wonder whether the public face of this struggle will actually come out through the music. There is also a concert being organised, announced at the rally – an announcement followed by the DJ putting on Smiley Culture’s second big hit of 1984 – Police Officer. The story of Smiley getting stopped by the police and them taking his weed – and partly letting him off for being such a great reggae musician – is as upbeat as it gets, even while masking the continuing narrative or racial harassment by the police, then and now.

It was clear that this wasn’t just a march for a murdered reggae star. It was a demonstration of strength against the continued killings by the police against our population. I sincerely hope that there will be further demonstrations, and I urge others to help build for them when they can. While the left focuses so much of its energies on resisting the cuts, it’s vital to remember that for many people there is little difference between the attitude of the state now and two years ago – or twenty years ago, or fifty years ago.

(ammended Tuesday 19th April).

Mathew Bell’s interview with Lord Tebbit, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, predictably touched upon immigration. “When he steps off the train into London” the interview asks, “doesn’t he see an exciting and creative powerhouse, fuelled in part by the injection of foreign blood and money?”

No, he says, he worries that Londoners are being pushed out of their own city. But weren’t most Londoners once immigrants themselves?

And then the piece moves on. For some reason, this smart alec response from the interviewer gave me a jolt of discomfort. Yes Tebbit’s desire to blame immigrants is worse than wrongheaded. Yet in referring to the phenomenon of Londoners being pushed out of their own city , Tebbit is putting his finger upon an unfolding social tragedy that is every bit as real as it is painful. Right now half a generation of Londoners face a future of economic exile, of being uprooted from the city in which they grew up by stagnating earnings and sky-rocketing property prices.

The implication that this is a non-issue, simply a red-herring, because “hey we’re all immigrants really” – this just doesn’t cut it. Bell could have pointed out that the decimation social housing – carried out by Tebbit’s party – is a major factor driving Londoners out of London, as indeed is the growth of huge inequality. But instead he stuck to playing word games. After all, if we’re all immigrants really, who cares who gets to stay and who has to leave.

There is no overlooking the fact that for the last decade at least, its the right who have been making the weather over the question of immigration. And if this is all we have to offer i response then they will continue to do so. We cannot adequately defend mass immigration by simply telling people they need to relax about the status quo – because for many the status quo is not working.

There is no necessary reason why immigration must bring harm to any particular section of the population. But neither will it automatically work for the benefit of us all (immigrants included), regardless of the social and economic conditions in which it takes place. When housebuilding is kept in check by restrictive local planning, when no efforts are made to replace mass of social housing lost under previous governments, and when the scarce living space that exists is simply allocated to the highest bidder – then, under those circumstances, the immigration of hundreds of thousands into London may make it more difficult for the children of some of those already living here to afford to stay.

If we are to resist calls for tighter and tighter controls, then we must do so by making a call for change. Only by offering an alternative vision for our city can we make clear that settled and immigrant communities are not competing in a zero-sum game. It is all well to talk about London being a “cultural and economic powerhouse”, but that is not its only function. For millions of us it is also home, and that is the function that, first and foremost, it must fulfill.

Last week Brian True-May was suspended as producer of everyone’s favourite rural English take on Nightmare on Elm Street, Midsomer Murders, for some slightly non-pc comments.

“We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved,” True-May said. “Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them… We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.”

Unsurprisingly, True-May’s assumption that audiences are as racist as he came across in that Radio Times interview attracted some criticism, not least from a “shocked and appalled” ITV themselves and from Charlie Brooker, who is right about everything except this. Because I think True-May’s detractors are being a little unfair. Midsomer Murders is not the product of a twisted bigot. It’s the vision of a brilliant and stalwart anti-racist hero who refuses to bow to the stereotypes of white and black, rich and poor.

Setting aside that I am from both an ethnic minority background and from a bastion of Englishness about ten times as rural as Midsomer, and bracketing for the moment the programme’s literary vision of an England that never really existed, it’s worth noting the show’s deep commitment to social realism. The programme’s depiction of incest, for example. There’s quite clearly plenty of that in the countryside, even if there are no black or Asian people. And the lack of expletives. People are almost definitely very polite to one another while hacking each other up with garden saws over some homosexual blackmail. Black mail, of course, not black people. But why?

Well, the answer to the show’s lack of ethnic minority characters is not due to the racism of the producer. Quite the opposite. And it can be found in what is probably the programme’s most fundamentally realistic element. It’s alarmingly high per capita murder rate.

Now, there have been 81 episodes thus far, with an average of three murders per episode. Assuming each episode takes place over the course of a week, that gives us 156 murders per year. The fictional county of Midsomer has much in common with Somerset which, in 2008 had an estimated population of 912,900. Assuming that Midsomer’s population is in the same region, that gives us an annual per capita murder rate of 17:100,000. That makes it higher than Mexico, where 13 people per 100,000 are murdered each year, higher than Zimbabwe at 7 people, the US at 4, and way above the UK average of 1.4:100,000. In fact, only Columbia, South Africa, Jamaica, Venezuela and Russia have higher per capita murder rates than Midsomer.

For a sleepy, middle-class community in rural England, this is of course highly accurate and the producers should be praised for creating not only a bastion of Englishness, but a bastion of realism. And True-May, far from being vilified as a racist, should be praised for promoting such a positive image of ethnic minorities.

After all, there are no black gangstas shooting up the hood, no Asian suicide bombers, no katana wielding Samauri. It’s all white on white violence. Quite clearly, True-May made a conscious decision to leave ethnic minorities out of Midsomer because he didn’t want to stereotype them. He wanted to get to the heart of human darkness, not in skin colour, but in the soul, showing that you don’t have to be working class, black or from a broken home to commit acts of depravity. The killer is in all of us, even in this rich white county where grime is what you get when your spouse (who statistically speaking is either a murderer or soon to be murdered) misses a spot under the windowsill, and the closest thing to hip-hop is your mother’s impending hip-op, which will invariably be performed by a budding Harold Shipman wannabe.

It is, of course, a constant source of amazement and amusement as to why anyone would want to live in a place that is only mildly safer than Helmand Province. I certainly wouldn’t. And in that, we can clearly see that True-May, far from excluding ethnic minorities, is portraying them as inherently sensible, rational people who would not, given the choice, opt to live in such high crime areas.

As such, Brian True-May is possibly the last bastion of anti-racism on English television.

Either that or he’s an idiot and it’s a really shit TV programme.

There is not much to say about Phil Woolas that hasn’t already been said. That said, the suggestion by one of my friends on facebook that he be “dragged away by armed police at 2am, and deported to somewhere he said was safe” is perhaps worth repeating.

Equally amusing is that the Tories have wheeled out Baroness Warsi to condemn Woolas’ “despicable and inflammatory campaign”. I must admit that I was a little surprised to hear that Warsi is so annoyed with a fellow politician for telling lies and inflaming tensions. Back in August Five Chinese Crackers picked up on Ms Warsi spreading the tired old “government bans christmas” myth. In an interview with the Guardian she said:

I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.’” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”

Except the state never has said “we will have winterfest instead of christmas. At least not in this dimension. Yet the myth does does exist within – and give energy to – the “natives under siege” fantasies spread by the tabloid press.

So I am glad that Warsi is now keen to remoralise politics. We might even be spared her telling tales about councils banning black rubbish bags.

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.

I just heard this broadcast on Radio 4, with the inspirational figure who paid for  it interviewed. It is a work of majestic genius, not of monumental racism. It is a tightly compressed, one minute burst of politics, densely layered and criss-crossed with meaning. It  manages to squeeze an extraordinary amount of subtext out of just a few simple statements, which are in no way false or meaningless. “They declared war against us”, “They want to build a mosque”; different ‘theys’ of course, but surely everyone realises that? The invocation to “kill the mosque” is evocative of shakespeare, not at all of lynch mobs and hate crimes. Only a paranoid idiot could interpret this as talking about all Muslims. All in all an indication of America’s status as a modern liberal democracy, entirely at home with its identity as a multicultural nation. Racism is a thing of the past after all. And anyway, Muslims aren’t a race, silly.

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.

Writing in today’s Guardian, the last standard bearer of the dead dream that is a socialist Labour Party hit out at critics by saying that if necessary, he would stand aside to secure Diane Abbot’s nomination for Labour leader. In fact, John McDonnell went further to say that “if my standing down would mean securing any woman on this ballot paper, or any black person, of course I will do so.”

That’s very noble of him. I’m sure he’d hold the door open for them too, unless he had to run off to help an old lady cross the street. McDonnell is right to say that principles must come before career. But giving a leg up to female and ethnic minority candidates, regardless of their policies, is not a principled position in and of itself. Would his offer extend to Thatcher? Or Mugabe? Clearly he felt saddened by the decisions of such shining leftwing beacons as Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper not to stand. Why? Because there aren’t enough vaginas on the ballot paper. Diane Abbot adds one, and can at least be said to have mildly progressive views.

But the point is, politics should not be about the colour of your skin, or the contents of your underpants, but the content of your character. It should not even be – and this will be a controversial point amongst socialists – about class. The defining point has to be policy. It doesn’t matter that John McDonnell is a middle-aged white male. It wouldn’t matter if he were Oxbridge educated like the New Labourite clones leading the race. All that matters is that he has the right policies, the right ideas, the right values. Of course more needs to be done to remove barriers to women and ethnic minorities succeeding across society and parliamentary politics is not exempt from this. But this cannot come at the expense of ideology.

Like most of the world, I cheered when Barack Obama won the US election. Not because he was black, but because he wasn’t a right-wing nutjob like the opposition. If the situation had been reversed, if McCain had been on the left and Obama the right, I would have forgone the opportunity to celebrate America’s first black president and cheered the man with the better politics regardless of his skin colour. To pretend otherwise is, well, slightly racist. It’s in this sense that I find McDonnell’s arguments, sincere and noble as they are, somewhat patronising. Yes, John, principles must come before career. But they must also come before colour, creed or sex. So go out and fight for them. And then maybe you’ll be in a position to genuinely help build a society that is free from all forms of discrimination.