General election 2015: "It pumps me up!!!" not a lot

"IT PUMPS ME UP!!!"

I KNEW David Cameron would try the Obama "anger translator" trick and screw it up. His speech today launching his small business manifesto (sic!) in London was made even more hideously embarrassing by not actually hiring in the translator. Perhaps it's an English flaw, confusing mere rich-kid petulance with the fiery passion he'd dearly love to exude but can't. And, one mo' thang, Dave, it's "you've got another THINK coming," not "another thing" (which is what I heard mumbled on Radio 4's World At One programme just now). Perhaps Dave should be given the opportunity to spend more time with his book after 7th May.

Team Cameron are making much of Dave's claim that he has plenty of other things to do with his life and that being Prime Minister doesn't mean as much to him as it does to the other party leaders in the general election. Smell the BS, taste those sour grapes and pucker up. Surely the role of PM is supposed to be the greatest honour this nation can offer short of tea and crumpets with Her Maj.

Ed is much more likeable, especially as the right's relentless Bullingdon bully-boy tactics have won him the sympathy vote with the nation's young women and given rise to the phenomenon of the Milifan. This is almost as bizarre to me as when mighty efforts were made to transform Margaret Thatcher into a sex symbol in the 1980s and overnight she was turned into Marilyn Monroe ... at least in the eyes of old colonels, Little Ingerland and Alan Clark (who perved about her ankles). I felt like the little boy who saw that not only did the King have no clothes, he was wrinkly and ponked of formaldehyde as well.

Same thing happened with Tony Blair. Was I the only person on the planet who saw a bland posh-git Nigelesque twit whose only stand-out character trait was acquired when he achieved war criminal status over Iraq?

It didn't bother me that Ed was caught inelegantly chowing down on a messy bacon sandwich, not a fraction as much as that Labour "immigration controls" mug (and I don't mean Ed Balls). Re housing — which is surely part of the Labour USP — he's tinkering at the edges, bringing in a mansion tax that catches accidentally asset-rich but income-poor Londoners; bashing the Buy To Let sector, which is a nice juicy target for skint governments, instead of tackling the root cause — NOT ENOUGH HOUSES BEING BUILT FOR THE PAST DECADES. Try that one, Ed, along with increasing decent social housing stock ... and watch those pesky BTL landlords wither away as fast as their savings in the age of deflation.

While Austerity Bastard and Austerity Lite battle it out, we almost missed the super-rich doubling their wealth in the last ten years, thanks to the main parties politely pretending it didn't happen like a fart at that tea with the Queen I was talking about.

It took the Labour Party more than a year to decide that the bedroom tax was a travesty and even longer to challenge the Tory narrative about the deficit, which has now set like concrete and for which you'd now need the equivalent of a political pneumatic drill to break through the lies accreted during the past five years. This election should have been a walk-over after the cruelty, theft and vandalism of the Tory/LibDem Coalition. Ed should heed Aditya Chakrabortty's warning highlighting parallels between Labour and Greece's Pasok party.

Who voted for the Royal Mail firesale? For tuition fees trebled, for tax breaks for the rich, the poor and disabled hounded to suicide? The explosion in food bank use? The whole IDS DWP nightmare?

On the other hand, look at the overlaps of ghastliness with the last Labour government. Who can forget the Private Finance Initiative, loving up to non-doms like Lakshmi Mittal (yes, Ed is doing something now), the near-complete collapse of house-building? Who was it who brought in tuition fees in the first place? How many in the Labour camp have financial interests in privatising the NHS (hi, Alan Milburn and Cherie Blair!). How many Labour peers voted for the NHS Privatisation Bill ... and then it turns out they have financial interests? Former Home Secretary Dr John Reed a director of G4S, Jack Straw selling himself ...

Ach! They're all awful. Having personally witnessed how the far left is just another ruling class in waiting, I'll probably vote Labour just to get rid of the Tories. It pumps me up not a lot!

Britain's "liberal" media and UK Chinese: from London Chinatown to the general election

The Guardian has always been sloppy about China matters, but its publishing stable now appears to have given up any pretence of writing about UK Chinese issues informatively.

"It was a genuine community built by the emigrants from Hong Kong who, having been bombed out of Limehouse in the East End in the 1940s, made this patch of London, with its cheap commercial rents, their own," writes Daniel Boffey in the Observer about Soho's Chinatown

Er ... I don't think so. I know we all look the same to the "liberal" media but it was Cantonese and Shanghainese sailors and their families living mainly in the two streets of Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, not Hong Kong migrants, who were bombed out during the war: a large number were rehoused in Poplar.

My father was an early Chinese occupant in Soho's Chinatown from 1947 when it was mostly Indian and Jewish. It wasn't until the 1950s — but really the '60s — that waves of Hong Kong migrants got the takeaway industry going after the domestic washing machine rendered laundries largely obsolete. They bought up the fish 'n' chip shops that were going under and started serving their own food.

You wouldn't find many HKers in that early Soho mix. A few Kuomintang diplomats finding new ways to make a living and former Cantonese and Shanghai sailors, but hardly anyone from HK.

In the ten-part series Chinese in Britain, which I presented on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 (repeated last year), we looked at the history of UK Chinatowns including Limehouse and Soho, but the pattern of not allowing ethnic minorities to tell their own story persists in some organs which continue to get it wrong.

At best, invisibility is thrust on us; at worst, the Chinese are still defined as villains. From the yellow-peril Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer to the BBC's Sherlock reboot, where even innocent Chinese passers by in Soho Chinatown were portrayed as sinister and "other", the Chinese are dehumanised and excluded. Yet none of the liberal media paused for breath between BAFTAs and plaudits to question why, well into the 21st century, the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation was breathing life back into what should be moribund racist tropes.

In Channel 4's recent  debate concerning the role of the ethnic vote in the imminent general election, chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, only one single solitary east Asian face could be seen in the audience — placed on the corner in the seat nearest to Krishnan where he stood more chance of being picked up by the cameras, presumably after someone panicked on the night at the oversight. None on the platform. Yet Chinese are Britain's third largest Black and Asian minority ethnic minorities (BAME) after South Asians and African Caribbeans.

In a piece for the South China Morning Post magazine last October, I outlined how the ethnic vote could swing results in the marginal seats, with the Chinese key to the outcome in 36 seats including Barnet in May. Still, here are the Chinese being excluded yet again.

So when the Chinese are next accused of being the authors of their own exclusion ... think on.

My article on the Ming Ai Chinese in Britain project for the South China Morning Post magazine.

Pic from Red Scarf

Chinese Britons could swing the general election vote in some constituencies

Sonny Leong and Ed Miliband

As the British local and European elections heave into view, watched closely for how likely the 2015 general election is to yield victory for feudal baron David Cameron or milquetoast Ed Miliband, here's my South China Morning Post column from last year in which the Chair of Chinese for Labour Sonny Leong explains why non-white voters may hold the balance of power in some constituencies.

Does this mean the end of racial discrimination against BAME Brits ? Or could it also partly explain why the white male establishment is hell-bent on protecting its last gobby bastion of crude race dominance, Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear team at the BBC?

City scope: Ready to be counted
Anna Chen in London
13 October 2013

With the numbers of ethnic-minority voters exceeding the electoral majorities of sitting members of parliament in 168 constituencies, it is being suggested that minorities hold the key to the outcome of Britain's next general election, in 2015. Britain's ethnic-Chinese population, meanwhile, has reached almost half a million, and Chinese voters exceed in number the MP's majority in 36 seats. Political parties may well decide it is time to attend more to their interests.

In an era of no outright winners and coalition fudges, those 36 seats might mean the difference between power and limping along in opposition for five long years. Sitting MPs, fearful for their survival, now have to target communities within communities. There could be some interesting horse-trading with Chinese constituents.

Sonny Leong, chair of the Labour Party's Chinese for Labour, says, "The Chinese have reached a certain size where they can be power brokers. The ethnic minority is an important group that no political party can ignore."

Leong alludes to a certain complacency that has existed until now. Labour was long able to take ethnic votes for granted, but politics have become less tribal and voters no longer adhere blindly to family tradition when choosing which party to put their cross next to. Just because Grandpa voted for a party all of his life doesn't mean his independent-minded grandchildren will back the same one.

More than ever, issues and policies determine who gets votes and, for Chinese, educational opportunities and immigration issues tend to be priorities. Every Chinese here is likely to know of someone affected by immigration clampdowns. For Labour that could be good news, electorally; for the parties who form the current coalition government - the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats - recent accusatory, anti-immigration ad campaigns do not bode well for gaining Chinese votes, especially as the MPs of both are still overwhelmingly white.

Unlike in other Western democracies, in Britain Chinese have practically no parliamentary representation, other than one member of the House of Lords, the baby-faced Baron Wei of Shoreditch, of whom few had heard before Prime Minister David Cameron made him policy "tsar" for his Big Society initiative in 2010.

Just as little has been heard of him since he resigned his tsar-ship in May 2011 (because nobody had told him it didn't come with a pay packet).

Class War comes to Penge: Ian Bone standing in Lewisham in the general election

Looking forward to seeing Class War liven up the general election. "Because all the other candidates are SCUM!" With very few exceptions, I'd say they were cutting with the overall mood.

If you don't like the sentiment, then make sure your candidate does their job, represents their constituency, protects the rights of their voters rather than the rich and basically does NOT behave like scum.

Anarchist Ian Bone is standing in Lewisham West and Penge in 2015.

Titanic election boat of celebrities fails to sink. Millions disappointed

Millions of BBC license-payers were disappointed as the D-list celebrity-laden BBC election speshul boat, "SOS UK PLC", failed to sink in the early hours of Friday morning.

"They couldn't even get that right", said Ms A Chen from North London. "Pissed as a truckload of second-hand double-colostomy bags and they couldn't even give the electorate the little bit of pleasure of a very apt metaphor."

Described by some as "embarrassingly awful", at first it looked like the revellers were speaking an unknown language but then viewers realised that if they put their TVs onto the "drunk as skunk" setting, they could make out every second word.

Tory and Labour grandees and their minions took up the mantra, "You're my mate, you are" whenever the Lib-Dems hove into view.

Our most popular starry slebs such as Piers Morgan, Joan Collins, Martin Amis, Bruce Forsyth, Maureen Lipman, Fern Britton and Sir Ben Kingsley added the glamour befitting their enormous stature in the culture, showing the rest of us how to have a good time when civilisation as we know it draws to a close. Joan Collins mooned the TV cameras. Or did I imagine it? She might as well have done for all the respect we were shown.

A frighteningly orange-haired elderly gentleman with Botox Freeze, going by the name of Andrew Neil, demonstrated his popularity with his high-falutin' chums. Michael Portillo, Ian Hislop, Alistair Campbell and Michael Ashcroft, not short of a bob or two (where's our £120 million?!!!), had a high ol' time at our expense, thus demonstrating how they mean to carry on.

The only thing missing was Conrad Black and his missus dressed up as Richelieu and Marie-Antoinette. It all made me nostalgic for tumbrils and Workers Councils. Or at least pitchforks and torches.

Titanic election boat of celebrities fails to sink. Millions disappointed

Millions of BBC license-payers were disappointed as the D-list celebrity-laden BBC election speshul boat, "SOS UK PLC", failed to sink in the early hours of Friday morning.

"They couldn't even get that right", said Ms A Chen from North London. "Pissed as a truckload of second-hand double-colostomy bags and they couldn't even give the electorate the little bit of pleasure of a very apt metaphor."

Described by some as "embarrassingly awful", at first it looked like the revellers were speaking an unknown language but then viewers realised that if they put their TVs onto the "drunk as skunk" setting, they could make out every second word.

Tory and Labour grandees and their minions took up the mantra, "You're my mate, you are" whenever the Lib-Dems hove into view.

Our most popular starry slebs such as Piers Morgan, Joan Collins, Martin Amis, Bruce Forsyth, Maureen Lipman, Fern Britton and Sir Ben Kingsley added the glamour befitting their enormous stature in the culture, showing the rest of us how to have a good time when civilisation as we know it draws to a close. Joan Collins mooned the TV cameras. Or did I imagine it? She might as well have done for all the respect we were shown.

A frighteningly orange-haired elderly gentleman with Botox Freeze, going by the name of Andrew Neil, demonstrated his popularity with his high-falutin' chums. Michael Portillo, Ian Hislop, Alistair Campbell and Michael Ashcroft, not short of a bob or two (where's our £120 million?!!!), had a high ol' time at our expense, thus demonstrating how they mean to carry on.

The only thing missing was Conrad Black and his missus dressed up as Richelieu and Marie-Antoinette. It all made me nostalgic for tumbrils and Workers Councils. Or at least pitchforks and torches.

Mother Nature grounds main parties: if pigs could fly

Even Mother Nature hates them. Today's spectacular eruption in Iceland has sent giant plumes of ash headed for Old Blighty, shutting down airports and preventing the three main parties hitting Scotland for the general election campaign. Those Scots must have some powerful mojo. Respek!

The Guardian reports:

After the severe winter weather and the BA strikes, the UK is becoming fairly accustomed to flights being cancelled. However not even the most cynical of travellers could have predicted that planes would be grounded today due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Having lain dormant for almost 200 years until last month, the volcano beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, 120 km east of Reykjavik, erupted spectacularly yesterday. ... Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories, with all the main parties hurriedly trying to rearrange high profile visits from senior figures flying up from London. After the Lib Dems confirmed that a visit by Treasury spokesman Vince Cable to Edinburgh and Dunfermline had been scrapped, the defence secretary Bob Ainsworth had to cancel a visit to Rosyth dockyard to campaign for Labour's candidate and the Tories abandoned Ken Clarke's trip to the Borders.

May I ask how Ken Clarke still has a political career? This was the man who, as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, aggressively promoted smoking to a new generation of Third World markets, including Chinese youth. Hey, Ken: smoking kills!

Come, Mother Nature. Do your stuff.

Read Harpy Marx on the Labour Manifesto: a fair kicking for the poor.

Mother Nature grounds main parties: if pigs could fly

Even Mother Nature hates them. Today's spectacular eruption in Iceland has sent giant plumes of ash headed for Old Blighty, shutting down airports and preventing the three main parties hitting Scotland for the general election campaign. Those Scots must have some powerful mojo. Respek!

The Guardian reports:

After the severe winter weather and the BA strikes, the UK is becoming fairly accustomed to flights being cancelled. However not even the most cynical of travellers could have predicted that planes would be grounded today due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Having lain dormant for almost 200 years until last month, the volcano beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, 120 km east of Reykjavik, erupted spectacularly yesterday. ... Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories, with all the main parties hurriedly trying to rearrange high profile visits from senior figures flying up from London. After the Lib Dems confirmed that a visit by Treasury spokesman Vince Cable to Edinburgh and Dunfermline had been scrapped, the defence secretary Bob Ainsworth had to cancel a visit to Rosyth dockyard to campaign for Labour's candidate and the Tories abandoned Ken Clarke's trip to the Borders.

May I ask how Ken Clarke still has a political career? This was the man who, as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, aggressively promoted smoking to a new generation of Third World markets, including Chinese youth. Hey, Ken: smoking kills!

Come, Mother Nature. Do your stuff.

Read Harpy Marx on the Labour Manifesto: a fair kicking for the poor.