A welcome mild spell of weather in the UK takes some of the pressure off us from spiking energy prices under the new world order's decoupling from China, our global lifeboat and factory. Every country that refuses to come to heel in the Rules-based order that has quietly replaced the Rule of International Law is now target for the declining US, riven as it is by a looming recession deflating the Mother of all Market Bubbles, an incipient civil war between two equally unpleasant opposing factions of north America's ruling class, and Covid rendered endemic in pursuit of the rising rival.
The USA's promiscuous use of sanctions on anyone who even looks at them funny has accelerated the drive to find a multipolar solution to the declining hegemon's incessant wars and exploitation. Africa shudders as it realises it's next on the menu. Latin America has been around this block many times. The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa with more than a dozen others queuing up to join) realise they're in a race against time as the West dons its 19th century Empire drag in the absence of anything positive left to offer.
In December, under some of the most aggressive propaganda attacks ever fielded by the West, China finally decided to make a break for safety, taking advantage of the milder Omicron variant. The media's screeching about "inhumane" lockdowns under the Zero Covid policy immediately turned on a dime to howls of rage that China dropped Zero Covid. Such doublethink barely masks the absurdity of complaining that China may end up giving us back the variants we'd been stewing up and sending there over the past three years.
Who does the Guardian deflect onto as "unreliable" and not transparent?
From the start, China's Covid eradication roadmap, achieving Zero Covid by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown Jan-Apr 2020, was aggressively sidelined by the mainstream media. The Guardian even front-ran the Republican Senate's 57 page memo (April 2020) instructing politicians and media to "blame China", the effects of which have been felt ever since at the expense of public health.
The people of China held out for three years while Trump delayed, called the pandemic a hoax, stigmatised masks, held superspreader rallies, undermined the science and allowed Covid to seed in the population. Johnson mirrored Trump, matching more than a million US deaths with 200,000 of our own.
Thankfully, there weren't the same ruthless geopolitical objectives when we worked together to eliminate smallpox, polio and other killers or we'd have been truly stuffed decades ago. We aren't testing or counting — who is it who's not transparent?
China's now having to run through the fire as our variants overwhelm their efforts to much gleeful spite from the West.
In true Orwellian fashion, war is peace, freedom is slavery and we now claim our huge, unnecessary death toll, the battle with Long Covid and damage to the NHS for privatisation as a success.
It's not just Covid that alarms. It's the gradual but relentless nailing into place of a narrative that serves our feral, under-taxed elite now straining for a war on our global lifeboat.
Kneejerk responses regurgitate the suppression of whistleblowers who, its turns out, were not whistleblowers after all, as I and others have repeatedly pointed out:
The media preferred to turn the late opthalmologist Dr Li into a martyr as proof of a cover-up despite his WeChat message wrongly identifying SARS going "viral" in an email and threatening panicked flight of a possibly infected public after Dr Zhang had already reported her grim discovery. Dr Li's message was to a small WeChat group, a member of which shared it against his specific request. The World Health Organisation, US CDC and press including Reuters knew of the novel coronavirus by 31st December. Dr Li wasn't arrested as claimed, but was heavy-handedly reprimanded by police on 3rd January — after work had begun on the virus and news was out — and told to sign a document pledging he wouldn't do it again. Tragically, he would become an early victim of the virus, catching it from a patient and dying on 7th February.
Americans would find suppression of critical medical information nearer home in Seattle where Dr Helen Chu found early Covid-19 cases from as far back as January 2020 — "It's just everywhere already"— but was told to shut up and stop testing. Or watch the CDC's director Robert Redfield finally testifying to Congressman Harley Rouda in March that they had been wrongly diagnosing Covid-19 deaths as flu.
No Cold War online event Wednesday 25th May 2022 NATO, Ukraine and Russia: war, propaganda and censorship
The West's propaganda modus operandi: a short 21st century timeline of the race to World War III
Anna Chen's No Cold War talk @35m. I was timed out at Point 9 below, so here's the full text of my speech.
When China explored the world in the 15th century and reached as far as East Africa, they traded a bit and brought back a giraffe.
When Europeans landed in the Americas in 1492, they killed and enslaved its native peoples, stole their treasures and gave them smallpox blankets in an early form of biological warfare.
In North America, 100 million native Americans were killed, Black Africans were put through slavery, Jim Crow and imprisonment. The USA was literally built on an ancient Indian burial ground, because that’s what they’d turned it into.
And that’s pretty much been the template ever since.
Europeans sailed beyond their own lands for conquest, glory and fortune. The Chinese mostly stayed at home.
The Chinese invented gunpowder for great firework displays.
Europeans turned gunpowder into murderous weapons of conquest.
If China is the newly rich kid wearing a Rolex who’s wandered on to Mafia turf and is about to be rolled, then America is the 300lb ex-champ who’s geriatric and punch-drunk from all those fights. He’s pinned the kid against a wall, fist in his face, screaming blue murder that the kid’s about to hit him.
Australia and Britain, the Ugly Sisters of the piece, nod enthusiastically and use the opportunity to bury bad news …
like Hard No Deal Brexit fallout,
a wrecked economy,
excess Covid deaths
and a society that’s breaking down.
(There's an argument to be had that Great Britain, with the oldest secret service in the world dating back to Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan times, is the Wicked Stepmother and that the US is the senior Ugly Sister. They fell out regarding control over Iran and its oil fields in the 1950s, and the US stuck to the One China policy. However, GB has at last, after decades, managed to get the US on board for Winston Churchill's balkanisation of China: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.")
Asian people are scapegoated, attacked and killed, all whipped up by the crudest anti-Chinese racism that’s lain dormant as an inserted Yellow Peril memory — which is now being triggered at every level by the 4th Estate of the State, the mainstream media.
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in The Fall of the Roman Empire with Technology, and sometimes, it’s the 1930s. And someone is doing their best to pin a blood libel on the Chinese.
But the plutocrats and industry giants of the West don’t just hold the delusion of conquest of China as the endgame. They are also ridding themselves of surplus labour which is, of course, us. Pampered middle and working class westerners of the post-war liberal era who never had it so good are now being hollowed out and presented with the bill.
So how did we get from the global economy running in sync and relative peace to the West’s race towards a war on the fat, juicy prize that is China?
The Anglosphere’s propaganda wars rely on the public not joining the dots. Events are presented as mysterious disjointed acts of the cosmos without cause or effect.
Never forget the Battle of Orgreave, 18th June 1984, which rehearsed and revealed the depth of manipulation by the state.
Thousands of striking coal miners picketed the British Steel coking plant. The day erupted in violent clashes between the miners and the heavy police presence, many of whom were on horseback.
The news bulletins that night showed the miners attacking the police, who seemingly horse-charged them in response, eliciting public sympathy for the cops and outrage for the miners.
However, when the original film was examined, it emerged that the the TV news outlets had shown the news footage in reverse order, reversing cause and effect, when it had been the police on horseback who'd attacked the peaceful and legally picketing miners.
They cut up the narrative, respliced it, started it at Act 2, slashed the backstory entirely, recast heroes as villains and villains as heroes.
Attackers became victims and victims attackers.
2) China begins to buy US debt in 2000. In 2006, the value of the US dollar falls by a third because of Iraq war inflation. Meantime, an alarming housing bubble is being pumped up. When China complains, the US tells them to suck it up.
3) Two years later, America’s economic shenanigans lead to a breakdown of their system with the financial meltdown in the US Great Crash of 2008. A global Depression is feared. Deficiencies in Western capitalism are exposed and the system discredited in the eyes of many around the world. China steps in to act as a shock-absorber and rescues the world economy by allowing global currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a massive economic hit themselves. They buy even more huge amounts of US debt until China holds over a trillion dollars’, and they stimulate domestic consumption because 1.4 billion Chinese can buy a lot of goods.
4) So China saves the world economy from devastation. And how is China thanked for this?
In October 2011, only three years after China saves us all from America’s Great Crash, Hillary Clinton — Obama’s Secretary of State — writes her notorious piece urging US control of the “Western Pacific” (South China Sea!) and the Central Eurasia landmass.
Three huge countries lie in a straight line across the landmass from Europe to Asia: they are, from West to East, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, plus the little known region of China called Sinkiang in ancient times, now known as Xinjiang – China’s back door into Central Asia and Europe. Taiwan claims Mongolia as part of China, so let’s hope President Tsai isn’t made Empress of all the Chinas as the USA seems to want.
The title of Hillary Clinton’s piece is America’s Pacific Century and basically lays out the aims of the Project for the New American Century (began in 1997).
Hillary writes: “… there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”
The same year, a NATO coalition attacks Libya and destroys the country.
5) A year later, in 2012, President Obama Pivots to Asia, removing US military from the Middle East and pouring it into Asia where America has about 400 bases surrounding China. By doing so, America takes the first step in existentially threatening China.
2013: US-Australia practise war on China in the exercise “Talisman Saber,” involving 22,000 American and 10,000 Australian personnel and 27 warships.
2014: The US and Philippines begin annual military exercises over the pretext of disputed islands and shoals. Vietnam already started militarising their reclaimed islands back in the 1970s.
6) Obama revives military exercises in the Malacca Strait, situated between Indonesia and Malaysia, threatening to fence in China. Previous massive US exercises had been held in 2006 and 2007, prompting China to take defensive measures. Around 80 per cent of South China Sea traffic is China sending us their goods.
7) Donald Trump is elected in 2016, partly in fear of Killary's enthusiasm for World War. Trump launches a Trade War on China on spurious grounds. He imposes crippling trade tariffs on Chinese imports (paid for by the American consumer), claiming a huge trade deficit but when you factor in the American corporate giants providing sales and services inside China — like Apple, Microsoft, MacDonalds, Nike, Coke and Starbucks — the deficit is actually a surplus of about $24 billion.
8) Around the same time as Trump’s Trade War, there’s a slew of Thucydides Trap articles warning us not to have a war just because Athens is catching up with Sparta. The trap refers to the situation in history when an upcoming power (ancient Athens) rivals the existing power (Sparta) and the result is a devastating war that wrecks both sides. China negotiates trade in good faith, increasing their purchase of US farming produce and machinery, but refuses to buckle.
11) Everyone forgets the Thucydides Trap warnings about conflict between the established superpower and the rising one as the US of Amnesia goes to work.
12) Manufacturing consent for war is started by various military thinks tanks: ASPI, CIMSEC etc. This will involve transferring our collective horror of America's war atrocities and trail of dead on to a country that hasn't had a war since 1979.
13) Western mainstream media such as the Guardian close to opposing views by the time of Hong Kong riots and the CoVfefe outbreak in 2019. The Guardian's sister paper, The Washington Post, is owned by oligarch Jeff Bezos whose Amazon juggernaut runs the Pentagon's Cloud. Capitalism now openly runs the state.
14) In January 2020, just as the world is waking up to the Covid pandemic, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls the Communist Party of China the “central threat of our times.”
Most people have heard Pompeo’s notorious boast that he lies, cheats and steals and runs entire courses on it. How many know this is the exact wording of the Honor Code of the West Point Military Academy he attended … but in reverse: “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do”. They are laughing AT you, not with you.
15) Biden is elected President in November 2020 and raises America's military spend to $780 BILLION a year. On top of this he places a fat bounty on China's head when he budgets $500m a year specifically on anti-China propaganda.
After promising he won't start World War 3, Biden forms AUKUS with Australia, and UK, bringing nuclear war to Asia.
In May 2022, Biden will lash up with Japan in preparing for a war on China on the pretext of "defending" Taiwan despite paying lip-service to the One China policy. Constant sabre-rattling provocations — supplying military arms, sending trainers and politicians to the island, sailing entire warfleets off the coast and sending submarines and airplanes into China's territorial waters and airspace — fail to provoke China into hot conflict with its own territory. America and the West are denied their casus belli and it enrages them.
16) In January 2022, a colour revolution attempt in Kazakhstan (nestled between Russia and Xinjiang) is swiftly ended by Russia and China in cooperation. It becomes clear that, in order to defeat China, the US axis will have to cut the legs out from under it - prime target, Russia.
18) Putin sends his military into the Ukraine. Biden gets his war at last.
19) So … Obama launches the war on China after Dubbya Bush sets it up.
Trump and his Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight find the plans and try to play it clever.
Biden becomes Trump Lite, gets a taste for it and eclipses even the Donald’s hideousness. He’s unable to fulfil even his promise of ending student debt.
I look at the richest country on the planet and see what they’ve done with their wealth. It has been one long looting spree until the top 0.1 per cent own as much as the bottom 90 per cent and the top 0.01 per cent own 11.2 per cent of America's total wealth. Having sucked their own country dry, a tiny stratum of oligarchs, plutocrats, Military Industrial Complex, fossil fuel companies, tech giants and gun-lobby enthusiasts are now creating new hunting grounds in order to replenish and reinvigorate their imploding economy.
And the mainstream media, the Fourth Estate whose role it is to hold the power of the first three estates — legislative, executive and judicial — to account, are right in there with them.
No Fourth Estate, no democracy.
The Europe-Asia landmass
No Cold War online event 25th May 2022 NATO, Ukraine and Russia: war, propaganda and censorship
Speakers:
Andrew Feinstein - Author, campaigner and former African National Congress MP
Camila Escalante - Journalist and presenter for Kawsachun News
Asa Winstanley - Journalist and political commentator
Anna Chen - Writer, poet and broadcaster
Kayla Quesada - Academic and geo-political analyst
Steve Sweeney - International Editor of the Morning Star
Chair: Sequoyah De Souza - No Cold War Britain
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.
Actress Lucy Sheen asks what many of us are wondering.
Is the media ready to accept East Asians as part of British diversity?
So after a hopeful start to last week with the launch of Act For Change campaign, the broad acceptance from ITV and the BBC that quotas for BAME artists and creatives are a good thing, to help ensure the diversity and variety that we experience in reality is reflected back in the media.
That was not what I was expecting to hear, very welcome, but then I’m a cynic. I’ve had over thirty years of watching , being actively involved when I was young enthusiastic and naively optimistic. When I say that I was involved, I was as ‘involved’ as those in power would allow a young East Asian to be involved. Back in the days when I would have been referred to as an Oriental. Yes folks, you read it right. ORIENTAL. Not that such language and terms are being used nowadays …
So when it comes to matters of equality and diversity, especially being an East Asian, where we are a minority within the minorities and still being treated appalling, is it any wonder after thirty years that I have evolved into the cynic that I am now.
Why would now be any different to all the those other initiatives, schemes and past “interventions?”
Well . . .
Since the dreadful Royal Shakespeare controversy back in 2012 with their casting of The Orphan of Zhao things have never quite been the same, in my opinion, within the BAME community. (Sidebar, oh how I wish we could find a better term to use when referring to ourselves. Maybe it’s the dyslexic in me but whenever I see BAME I some how always fleeting see the word BLAME. Anyway that’s a whole separate post on it’s own).
And this is the American production of The Orphan of Zhao. Exact same play produced by the American Conservatory Theater – RSC et el take note
The classical foot in the mouth from the cradle of The Bard was probably the best thing that could have occurred for the British East Asians. It drew together many people from across the cultural and ethnic spectrum which is the reality of Britain. Hell it drew in support from around the world! The Orphan of Zhao wasn’t just seen as an East Asian “problem” and an insult to only British East Asians.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
It is a fault within our supposed multicultural, tolerant liberal society. Differing racial and ethnic groups came together and recognised that the British part of being East Asian, in fact Black or Asian was consistently being ignored and conveniently erased. If used, it was only when it was expedient for others to do so and always at our own expense. The British East Asian Artist group, in my personal opinion, has done more, been instrumental in more and has spoken out more, about the deplorable, lamentable and yes one could say ‘criminal’ state of affairs for British East Asian Artists. More movement, realistic engagement, instigation for change and equality has occurred in the short time since the BEAA (British East Asian Artists Group) was founded in 2012 then in all the previous years. Through the efforts and campaigning of the BEAA (British East Asian Artists Group) East Asians now find themselves at the table in vital and essential talks with the very institutions that have hitherto seemingly ignored British East Asians, such as the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) and Politicians. The BEAA actively supports both Act For Change and the TV Collective and has been instrumental in getting involved and achieving representation in talks with Ed Vaizey MP and the BBC.
The Arts Council of England published the findings of an independent report claiming that the arts and culture sector accounts for 0.4% of gross domestic product, with £5.9 billion worth of gross value added to the UK economy in 2011. London theatres enjoyed record ticket attendances and revenues in 2013, generating £97.5m of VAT receipts for the UK Treasury. Attendances for 2013 were up 4% on 2012 to 14,587,276 with gross sales rising by 11% year on year to £585.5m, according to the figures from the Society of London Theatre.
On stage in 2013 was an amazing year for British East Asian Artists:
The Arrest of Ai Weiwei at The Hamsptead Theatre in April. Chimerica in May at the Almeida Theatre then transferring to the Westend The Harold Pinter Theatre. Yellowface at The Park Theatre in May and then the Royal National Theatre at the Shed, The Fu Manchu Complex written by British East Asian actor, writer and activist Daniel York in September, The World of Extreme Happiness at The Royal National Theatre in The Shed in October and Golden Child at The New Diorama. It was an explosion of East Asian talent on stage and off. The productions found audiences. People bought tickets and put their bums on the seats. Audiences the mirrored the variety and diversity of the British population. People went to see shows about East Asians, with East Asian themes. And shock horror performed by British East Asian actors. Two things it can’t now be said there are no East Asian performers – or yes there are but then consistently only concentrating interest a small meagre handful of performers.
Secondly, no longer can it be said, “oh there isn’t an audience for such plays.”
Britain is a diverse and mixed country in terms of the people who now inhabit these shores.
In London, the 2011 Census, London’s population was 8.17 million, making it the most populous European city. More than 4 out of every ten Londoners (42 per cent) identify themselves as belonging to another group other than Caucasian. What everyone thinks about this state of affairs is an entirely different matter. Britain is not going to suddenly revert back to being a predominantly Caucasian country, sorry (well actually I am not) UKIP et all. The world has moved on, literally and so has its people from country to country, crossing continents and time zones.
So why hasn’t the British culture, our Theatre, Film and Television moved to reflect the diversity we see on our streets? I can’t believe that in the popular media I don’t regularly see characters the reflect me. I’m not talking about the odd Chinese waiter, tongue tied tourist, or the occasional Doctor or Surgeon or even overseas student.
When I turn on my TV, when I see another East Asian, it’s usually a characterisation from a very narrow perspective. Seldom do I see myself, or people who look like like me, portrayed in an accurate and realistic manner, let alone as being British. I have to make do with the heavily accented, menial and or illegal worker. Occasionally there’ll be a Doctor, a secretary or a nerdy student. Apparently there is no in between. As an East Asian more times than not, you’re isolated, socially separated by language, culture and ingrained biggatory.
As an overseas East Asian character you’re allowed to be intelligent, successful and financially well off, but you can also be ruthless, dodgy and somehow an inherently flawed human being. But on the upside you’ll be seen as authentic.
I’m standing right in front of you, as are many others, with not a “me no spleakie” accent, DVD seller or Machiavellian master of crime to be seen anywhere.
Is this continued white washing, an attempt to keep the British cultural landscape western and Caucasian? Is it an almost subliminal subconscious last stand? The last vestiges of institutional and structural racism? An attempt by the old guard in society to divide and rule and thereby some how keep the colonials in their place?
It’s not as if there aren’t the talented and trained East Asian artists out there. Where we fall down is the inability, or lack of willingness on the part of the British media to embrace East Asians. Unlike their colleagues of Black British and British Asian heritage who have been incorporated (to some degree) into the cultural landscape. Comedy shows and serials have been set around or based on their respective communities. Characters from specific ethnicities that draw the audience into an alternative view of British life.
The Fosters (1976-1977), Black Silk (1985), South of the Border (1988), Goodness Gracious Me (1988-2014), Desmond’s (1989-1994), Prime Suspect 2 (1992), The Kumars at nos. 42 (2001-2006), 55 Degrees North (2004–2005), Luther (2010-2013).
The East Asians have had Johnny Ho in the Chinese Detective (1981 – 1982) and that’s it.
It doesn’t happen often enough across the diverse spectrum of British society. The tragedy is why has this not progressed? The world continues to evolve but British popular media and drama apparently does not or will not? When will I be able to see The Lees from nos.8 or Penny Fields or what about Jean and Enid a black comedy set in an OAP home where the central character, Jean (imaginatively nick-named Chinese Jean by the nursing staff) forms an unlikely friendship with Enid new Staff nurse. If you’re interested in the latter then leave me a message and I’ll happily send over a synopsis or meet with you and talk.
I don’t want to be here in another thirty years still talking about the same issues.
As Anna Chen writer, political blogger, performance poet, stand up comedian and BEAA activist recently wrote: "For someone who’s pretty hard to miss, I’m surprisingly invisible. There’s a whole load of us feeling the same way, and we’re getting behind Act for Change."
Attitudes have to change, in the boardrooms, casting suites and commissioning offices.
Something has got to give, I hope that this is the beginning.
Hackney-born Chinese British punk Anna Chen kicks up. Pic by Bob Carlos Clarke
Act For Change Conference, Young Vic Theatre
30th June 2014
Chair: Shami Chakrabarti
Panel: Julie Crampsie, BBC casting director; Steve November, Head Of ITV programming; writer Stephen Poliakoff; film producer Allison Owen; and Ewan Marshall, former artistic director of Graeae Theatre Company.
Dear Act for Change Conference panel,
I would like to ask if the panel is aware of the dangerous political aspect of keeping East Asian Britons (BEA) invisible and excluded in the culture.
How being a blank canvas means that governments can divert social anger onto you.
There have been several occasions when there have been attempts to scapegoat British East Asians out of political expediency, such as the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in 2000/2001. When the outbreak was clearly out of the government's control — with images of burning pyres of livestock, and farmers committing suicide — someone from the now defunct Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) briefed Valerie Elliott of The Times that the outbreak was started by Chinese restaurants in Northumberland.
This was an absurd accusation of a minority based on no evidence whatsoever: just pure prejudice. However, all the mainstream press ran with it except, notably and honourably, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Ian Burrell of TheIndependent. Broadsheets and tabloids alike carried lurid headlines such as, “Sheep and Sow Source”. Nationwide fury towards the government over their incompetence was diverted onto a small innocent group.
It was possible for the accusation to stick in an unquestioning media environment for several scary months, during which there was intimidation, ostracism, threats, spitting and a build-up to physical attacks on Chinese in places like Cumbria, precisely because we are dehumanised by our invisibility. The association of minorities with filth and pestilence has some dangerous precedents in world history, and it is shocking to see that it can be done so swiftly here.
We are a blank canvas upon which anyone can project their own inner demons.
Fortunately, our efforts to challenge the perverse narrative peddled by politicians and press were successful. A delegation of Chinese representatives from across the community had meetings with Nick Brown, the MAFF minister, pointing out the obvious: that there was no scientific basis for the slur. For the first time ever the Chinese went on strike and closed Chinatown. A thousand of us marched to the MAFF offices where Nick Brown vindicated us in front of the world's cameras.
By continuing to collude in this invisibility, the various cultural bodies help to create a climate where social unrest, fears and anger, can be directed onto us.
We are part of the fabric of British society, not an exotic add-on. We expect to be treated as such. Does the panel understand the importance of this?
On a personal level, I was born and raised in Hackney, east London. I was perhaps the first Chinese British punk, hanging out at Vivienne Westwood's shop with other bright disaffected kids in the 1970s. I am as British as they come but I am constantly made to feel like an outsider. I do not want East Asian invisibility and exclusion to continue to adversely affect further generations of British youth.
I'm reposting my article, A Bad Case of the Trots, which was published in Tribune magazine, September 2003 following my time establishing and running the Socialist Alliance (SA) and Stop The War Coalition (STWC) press offices. (Also on What Next? Journal.)
In the light of the recent rape allegations and attacks on feminism in the far left, it's not surprising to learn that working-class non-white women who are also bright sparks, aren't allowed to have their input acknowledged on the left and in the histories. Indeed, any pioneering work is airbrushed out or relegated to background maid status, serving the dull white folk who, quite frankly in this instance, hadn't made any public impact before a methodical and robust engagement with the gatekeepers of the mainstream media took place.
Ian Sinclair, author of The march that shook Blair, the history that isn't written by STWC, and the second to contain interviews from "press officers" who weren't the ones who fought the battle at the media coalface, says:
"I was not aware of Anna’s contribution or testimony until after my book was published. No one I spoke to - over 70 face-to-face interviews and 50 written interviews - mentioned her. I do not recall seeing her name mentioned in any of the written documents or articles I read in my research."
Wow. At least maids get paid. Butterfly McQueen in Gone With the Wind received better billing than me.
For the record, I worked from 8am till gone midnight for no wages, going deep into debt to ensure the STWC anti-war movement had a press office. Both my physical and intellectual labour was appropriated and expropriated by the white middle-class males who dominate the far left organisations ... and their lady friends.
It's clear that my practise of not propelling myself to the forefront (like certain Princess Pushies) but making sure that others had their names emblazoned all over my press releases, was far from wise. So I'm making sure that an accurate representation of events are on the record and safe from airbrushing mitts.
Anyone who only wants the "official" version had better look away now ...
Paul Foot called me the "best press officer in the country".
Mike Marqusee, who wrote most of the press releases for the SA and STWC and worked closely with me on both campaigns, stated that, for the Socialist Alliance, I’d done single-handedly the equivalent of the Countryside Alliance’s 6 full-time paid press officers and their support with “flair and imagination”. So I was pleased to repeat the teamwork for STWC — with him writing most of the releases and me battling on the media frontline to get us heard.
Weekly Worker called my unprecedented press successes “uncanny”.
John Rees described my task as being like turning a tanker around mid-ocean, or mining for diamonds.
Charles Shaar Murray has commented that he saw me work: "... on a day-to-day basis from the start, and observed the effect it had as the media slowly responded and swung around from a position of hostility; witnessed how pleased many of your [Ian Sinclair] interviewees were with the results — notably John Rees and especially Mike Marqusee who got the starring role in all the press releases she sent out — I’m shocked with the way she has been Stalinised out of existence in your accounts."
Apart from the Amazing Disappearing Act, this was what I was up against when it came to fighting against war with Iraq: read The BBC and Iraq ten years on
I was pleased to spearhead the anti Iraq War press campaign (more details of what that entailed here) and delighted to get it relatively coasting — at which point various parties saw there was something up for grabs and have claimed credit for themselves — not very socialist, you might think.
I've now dug out my emails from the 2000-2003 period, which have been an effective refresher for me.
I'd forgotten that I got Ken Loach on board the STWC in October 2001, and won him interviews in the media right up until the huge million-strong demo in February 2003. I have a written eyewitness account, from writer and broadcaster Dale Reynolds, of the Football Match for Peace the weekend before the big demo, in which Americans Against the War played a team of Iraqi students in north London and which I turned into a national media even and warm-up event for the Feb 15th March. I'll be posting that soon.
Another example of the sort of work I was doing: in the course of my work as the STWC press officer (when no-one else apart from Mike Marqusee thought this important, as it was only the “bourgeois press” and “they never take any notice of us”) I tackled the problem of the BBC's under-reporting of demo attendance. After 2001, as well as regularly sending our press releases to Richard Sambrook,head of BBC news, I also wrote to him whenever we had a march (including pre-9/11 demos), challenging the figures they gave, which were invariably the same as the police’s 15,000. Equally invariably, he ignored them.
When, after one Media Workers Against the War (MWAW) meeting, I and one other person drafted a letter then signed by Lindsey and Pilger among others, the BBC’s response was to not only ignore us, but to report an even lower 10,000 for the next demo, which I thought was pretty dirty pool.
Because I then pursued other avenues (Rees always did say he liked my creative and lateral thinking), I finally got Sambrook on the back foot and received my first reply from him, a defensive missive showing that he was stung. After being belligerent for so long, it was a huge turnaround. He even wrote: “The relevant pages on BBC News Online were also updated. I accept we ought to have known your higher figure a little earlier.”
And so on, in the same vein.
I forwarded this email to Lindsey German and other esteemed leaders, asking them who would like to respond. No answer.
I then wrote to them again asking whether they wanted me to pursue this or if they would prefer to deal with it themselves. Again, nothing. Which is when I realised that all their bleating about the awful way the media and BBC in particular was covering the anti-war movement was nothing more than hot air.
This particular brand of "left" is too stupid to look after their assets and our achievements. The blokey blokes who write the histories of the movement [excluding Ian Sinclair 'cause he didn't do it deliberately] only skate on the surface, reluctant to dig deeper. In other words, a complete shower. With serious consequences.
If you could go back in time and nobble the architects of some of the greatest disasters in history, would you do it?
Luckily we don't have to time-travel to ensure press control does not pass into the hands of the government, ending our tradition of a free press — we're already here and staring at the far bank of the Rubicon. Leveson's recommendation for press regulations to be backed by statute — with harsh penalties for guilty parties — is no answer to the appalling corruption of sections of our Fourth Estate.
Lord Leveson's exoneration of both the police, who failed to enforce existing laws, and former Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, who made all the noises that he was hell-bent on pushing through Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of BSkyB, giving him an even bigger unaccountable monopoly of our media, does not fill me with confidence.
It's impossible to look at the Hacked Off platform of press victims without feeling heartfelt sympathy: the traumatised McCann's traduced as child killers while searching for their abducted daughter; Chris Jeffries picked on because he reads books and looks like a "weirdo" (read: intellectual); and of course the Dowlers whose murdered daughter's mobile phone was hacked by the News of the World, kicking off the scandal that led to the Leveson Inquiry.
However, their treatment could have been dealt with by the police and the courts. Phone hacking is illegal. Young women like Sienna Miller and Charlotte Church should not be hounded by baying packs of aggressive men just because they're famous. Why did the police protect their masters — their paymasters in some cases? How can Leveson seriously say that the police have no case to answer?
How did we get to the point where one powerful man's companies could do such damage to British society? Why has Leveson recommended laws controlling the press, when this looks like bolting the stable door after the nag has run, and not given the same emphasis to the dangerous monopoly of our democracy's media by a handful of ruthless press barons?
A brief history
The government has controlled the press before, granting licenses to those unlikely to alter the status quo. After licensing collapsed in the late 17th century, there was a mini-golden age that produced writers of the calibre of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and the Spectator's Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who sought, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality ... to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses".
Twenty years later, the imposition of a stamp duty tax hampered widespread readership by the masses until 1850s. The radical press had to operate without state legitimacy and remained vulnerable to harrassment.
The first of the big press barons, 1st Viscount Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, set up the Daily Mail in 1896 (before his ennoblement and two years after buying the Evening News), which became the first mass-selling daily paper. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury described it as, "written by office boys for office boys". Alfred wrote the editorials as a hands-on proprietor.
Along with his brother, Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, Northcliffe became richer that Croesus and would have told a nation what to think if it hadn't been for the existence of the quality Daily News (founder: one Charles Dickens) and the Daily Chronicle, both popular liberal papers. The Northcliffe/Rothermere empire bought up the ailing Observer (1905) and Times (1908), among others, and launched the Daily Mirror (1903).
Alfred Harmsworth launched the Daily Mirror as a paper by women for women (hence the name!) but, when it didn't work, the lady journos were sacked. The new editor, Hamilton Fyfe, said it was "like drowning kittens". He turned it into the first picture tabloid and it became a runaway success.
Such influence in the press by one man and his brother was unprecedented. Then along came Beaverbrook.
Already owning the London Evening Standard, Anglo-Canadian tycoon Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, acquired the Daily Express in 1916. He was said to have operated a blacklist of famous people who had offended him including Sir Thomas Beecham, Paul Robeson, Haile Selassie, and Noël Coward. He was awful but at least he didn't support Hitler like the Daily Mail proprietor, Rothermere. Rather, Beaverbrook's papers were an important arm of Britain's war machine, shaping and disseminating government propaganda during World War II.
The big three press barons of the first half of the 20th century, Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, were all very right-wing, though otherwise very different. Northcliffe was originally a Liberal Unionist, fanatically jingoistic and pro-Empire. Unlike his brother Rothermere, a fascistic bean-counter who supported Hitler, Northcliffe hired a range of talented writers from Rudyard Kipling to inter-war pacifist Norman Angell.
But power will always out. Flexing their political muscle, Beaverbrook founded the Empire Free Trade Crusade in 1929 and in 1930 briefy joined Rothermere in his United Empire Party (a bit like UKIP) to campaign for free trade against the protectionist Tories. It was a union which Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin condemned as "Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".
They benefited from the tabloid style of journalism (only the Mirror was actually tabloid in size). Attracting advertising, they were able to subsidise sale price, and increase cheap mass-circulation in an upward spiral — more ads made for cheaper papers but depended on a move downmarket. The DailyChronicle and Daily News followed this model with some success by World War I, and merged as the Liberal News Chronicle in 1920s, later sold to the Daily Mail in the 1960s.
The most notorious episode was probably Rothermere's Daily Mail backing Hitler and the Black Shirts until Moseley's boot-boys beat up the audience at a rally in London's Olympia.
The Times were a changing. Northcliffe died in 1922 and most of his empire went to his brother, Rothermere (who had already taken over the Daily Mirror and various other papers). In the 1930s, the Labour Daily Herald hit 2 million circulation, outstripping the Daily Mail. Rothermere lost interest in the Daily Mirror and sold his shares; the paper came under the control of his nephew Cecil King, acquired cartoons and moved leftwards to become an increasingly pro-Labour working-class paper and the biggest seller from the late 1940s to the 1970s.
King did not share his moneyspinner's politics, but it was a cash-cow.
The Daily Herald — co-owned by the Trade Union Congress and Odhams Press — took the reverse route and eventually became ... the soaraway Sun. How'd that happen?
In 1960, the Mirror Group bought up Odhams, including the Daily Herald and created the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). It now owned the two competing bestselling Labour-supporting dailies.
In 1964 Mirror management relaunched the Daily Herald as new mid-market white-collar paper, and renamed it the Sun for the new non-right wing middle-class. It didn't work. The new paper was too similar to the old one, and its target readership was already gravitating towards the Guardian. (Watch the beleaguered Guardian make a similar error with its new young digital target market.) It lost money so the Mirror sold it in 1969 — the choices were Robert Maxwell or Rupert Murdoch. In their wisdom, the Mirror Group unions thought they'd get a better deal from Murdoch and thus gave him his second base after his purchase of News of the World. Maxwell eventually bought and ransacked the Mirror and the rest is history.
It dived downmarket and by the 1970s the Sun was outselling the Daily Mirror. Murdoch backed the little known milk-snatcher in the 1979 general election. This paid off handsomely when he used his huge profits to buy the troubled Times and Sunday Times. His ownership of two major newpapers should have precluded him from the purchase but Thatcher's government failed to call in the monopolies and mergers commission over his growing domination. It can be argued that there was an absence of alternative buyers, although editor Harold Evans was attempting to find backers for his own buyout. Murdoch's Sunday Times eventually lost Harold Evans and, later, the investigative Insight team. Murdoch bust the unions through changing technology, destroying lives, but also revitalised the newspaper industry.
From the late eighties to 2008, the newspaper industry thrived, but Murdoch's influence via the Sun, the News of the World and much of the rest of News Corp has been deeply corrosive: Hillsborough, hacking, creepy sexualisation of human beings for commercial gain, police curruption, politicians' terror, trade union bashing and, across the Atlantic, Fox News. His pay-TV channels in the UK now dominate sports coverage and broadcasting of films and top American series.
We look at Fox News and give a collective shudder. Jeremy Hunt nearly pushed through Murdoch's bid to take 100 per cent ownership of BSkyB, giving one man and his family even more of a monopoly over our culture. Without the depraved actions of Murdoch's own news hounds hacking into Milly Dowler's mobile phone, it could all be so different. And that's only one of many reasons to remember the tragic young woman who's death kicked this all off.
ADDENDUM Sunday 2nd December 2012
A journalist compadre — Kate Belgrave — reminds me that grassroots journalists like her are thwarted in their bid to hold the powerful to account at every turn. How much more difficult will her job be with a new law, the first on statute since 1695?
Kate writes:
As someone who does the grassroots end of reporting, if you like, I'm very aware of the enormous restrictions that the state (or state in the form of local government) already places on reporting. Plenty of us have been told to stop recording or filming council meetings. We've had our phones, computers and cameras confiscated by security companies which haven't been through the proper security checks (Metpro, Barnet). Massive private sector contracts are decided in secret, or with paperwork being available only in the non-public sections of public meetings, etc. Staff who dare to whistleblow are harassed and hounded - for example, a group of women who supposedly talked to me for a Guardian story I did on a council supported living hostel closure were dragged through the disciplinary process at their council.
I've had letters from council lawyers for publishing links to documents on major privatisation deals. If Cameron's so hot on a free press, he might like to throw some of government's relationships with the private sector into the open. Let's see all the paperwork and every email sent to and from government and G4s. If journalists and media moguls are found to have broken the law, then they must be pursued by the law, as Anna rightly says. I have no time for illegality, or the abuse inflicted on innocent citizens by phone hackers posing as journalists. Just don't imagine for a moment that the press - or, at least, journalists who wish to report, rather than sensationalise - is already free.
The Barnet mass-outsourcing scandal and contracting shambles like Metpro certainly wouldn't have seen the light of day without the five Barnet bloggers there - they're among the best local journalists around. The Atos and ESA scandals were put on the map by bloggers - those bloggers managed, ultimately, to bring the mainstream along with them, but even now, those subjects aren't covered in anything like the detail they should be by the mainstream. People like Johnny Void and Joe Halewood are covering the looming Universal Credit and housing benefit disasters better than anybody. Their range is outstanding. They need more freedom, not less.
Sour grapes or what? Where's that famous British sporting sense of fair play? Having failed to make the doping charge stick, the liberal media are now insinuating that there must be genetic engineering behind Ye Shiwen's stunning 400-metre gold-medal win on Saturday in the individual medley.
If so, the Chinese can't be very good at it as they'd have had a squad of super-athletes smashing all the records rather than one solitary outstanding sportswoman. Selective breeding, perhaps. China could learn a thing or two from our royal family, they being so very good at It's A Knockout and playing with their ponies. And it wasn't Chinese scientists who tried to copyright the human genome for private profit.
There's something cruel about labelling this 16-year old as a cheat in front of the whole world as the BBC's Clare Balding and US swimming coach John Leonard did despite having no evidence. Poor kid comes good and now she's forever linked with an Olympics scandal. The home country's media tactic seems to be, "we'll make them choke on their victory".
The international athletes, however, have supported Ye and pointed out that it's not uncommon for swimmers to put on a spurt in their teens, as the 15-year old Lithuanian swimmer did. And it's not true that Ye outswam "a man" (shock, horror) although that would have been nice. In fact she was 23 seconds slower than Ryan Rochte but, as he slowed down in his final length when he sensed victory in the bag and she swam for all she was worth, she ended up being faster for the last 50 metres.
Meanwhile, Michael Phelps' astonishing run of 19 medals over his career — including eight in Beijing — is rightly accepted for what it is: an astonishing feat. But it's only valid when it's the US that's doing it. Dave Renton writes:
Of all the various arguments behind the suggestion that Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old winner of the women’s 400 metre individual medley, is a drugs cheat, the most compelling is that she has reduced her time for the 100m freestyle in a year by 7 seconds. US coach John Leonard says this is an impossible rate of improvement and compares Ye Shiwen to Michael Phelps, Leonard rejected comparisons to Michael Phelps, who broke the 200m butterfly world record when he was just 15, saying the American got “consistently faster every year on a normal improvement curve”.
These are Shiwen’s best times for the 100 metre freestyle at ages 14, 15, and 16: 2010 4:33.79 / 2011 4:35.15 / 2012 4:28.43
You will notice that Shiwen’s 2012 time is quite a bit faster than her 2011 time, but barely faster than her 2010 time, i.e. like quite a lot of professional sports people her progress has not been continuous, but punctuated, with (presumably) a growth spurt coming at just the right time.
These are Phelp’s best times for the 200 metres butterfly at ages 14, 15, and 16: 1999 1:55.42 / 2000 1:56.50 / 2001 1:54.58
You’ll see exactly the same pattern of a fast time, followed by a year’s regress, followed by a world best performance.
You’ll also see that in 2011 when he broke the world record, Phelps was about 1.6% faster than he had raced as a 15 year old, and about 0.9% faster than he had been 2 years before. In Shiwen’s case the improvements were 2.5% and 0.5% – i.e. her progress is a little bit faster than Phelps’ if you compare them over 1 year but slower than him if you compare them over two.
I don’t see any significant difference between their improvement rates at all.
One comment at the Guardian (where 98% of the poll says Ye deserves an apology) reads:
Ian Thorpe: "I took five seconds off my time in the 400m freestyle from the age of 15 to 16."
Adrian Moorhouse: "At 17, I took four seconds off my best time in the 200m breaststroke"
There was a spate of doping scandals in Chinese swimming in the 1990s but the tail-end of cold war competition meant that several countries were at it, not just China. And don't forget golden boy Linford Christie's substance escapades. As Renton observes:
Nor is US elite sport exactly drug free – at the climax of the athletics, in the men’s 100 metres, American eyes are expected to turn to Justin Gatlin, winner of the US Olympic trials, and banned in 2006 for 8 years (reduced to 4 on appeal) after a positive drugs test.
Chinese improvements are in part down to the fact they that they "have no comfort zone": Chinese athletes train harder, as one British coach working with the Chinese swimmers points out.
Although not head coach, I am in the Olympic Village with the Chinese team. I must say, taking aside the performances for a moment, the vast majority of comments on this (and many other sites I am sure) are riddled with inaccuracies and speculation.
I am certainly not aware of any talent ID programme – I am coaching five swimmers on this Olympic team and three of them I selected myself when they were 13 years old. No one "advised" or told me who to select – I just used my experience and "trained eye" to spot the guys I thought would be good.
Chinese athletes train incredibly hard, harder than I can explain in words and as a coach who has placed swimmers on five different Olympic Games teams, I have never seen athletes train like this anywhere in the world.
They have an unrelenting appetite for hard work, can (and will) endure more pain for longer than their western counterparts, will guarantee to turn up for practice every single time and give their all. They are very proud of their country, they are proud to represent China and have a very team focused mentality.
Let's also not forget that this is their only avenue for income; most do not study and sport offers them a way out or a way up from where they and their families currently live in society. If their swimming fails, they fail and the family loses face.
Newsnight, which pushed the boat out last night with the genetic engineering smear, is acquiring a habit of denigrating young women in the public eye. Working single mother Shanene Thorpe had to vigorously defend herself after they depicted her as a benefit scrounger.
The drugs body, which tests all the winners, may have cleared Ye. Lord Moynihan, chair of the British Olympic Association may have said: ""She's been through Wada's programme and she's clean. That's the end of the story. Ye Shiwen deserves recognition for her talent." But the media is still at it with the Guardian sourly headlining Ye's second gold-medal swim yesterday: "Ye Shiwen calmly takes another gold amid drug claims."
Today there's another uproar concerning the Chinese, with South Korean and Indonesian badminton teams also supposedly under-playing in order to compete with the weaker teams. The Chinese team is said to have thrown their game in order not to play their compatriots in the semi-final. Unlike with the Ye Shiwen case, there may be a case to answer, as reported in the Chinese press, with claim, counter-claim, and a knee-injury.
A source with the Chinese team told Xinhua that Yu injured her right knee while doing warmup before the game. The source accused the South Korean duo of trying to lose the game in order to avoid an early meeting with the other Chinese pair, saying "the South Koreans didn't take the game seriosuly and they didn't do warmup at all before the game." "It was the South Koreans who missed their serves first," the source said.
If this proves to be true then it is appalling and needs to be knocked on the head tout suite. Whichever way this one pans out, at least we've all forgotten the scandal of the acres of empty seats at the fantabulous London Olympics.
In the Guardian, 98% of readers who voted in a poll said Ye deserves an apology. So why are respected publications and outlets keeping this up?
Here's a proper Olympics scandal. Workers living in flooded squalour and paying £18 per day for the privilege whether they're given work shifts or not.
NOTE: The People's Republic of China only competed in the Olympic Games in Helsinki 1952 and did not rejoin the summer Olympics until 1984, missing the bulk of the notorious doping rivalry between the US and Soviet bloc that was a hallmark of the Cold War.
In all the excitement of Danny Boyle's stunning London Olympics opening ceremony, I hadn't realised there might be a second phase of pleasure to be had for us armchair enthusiasts. Shrilling out from the widespread sigh of relief that Britain did not suck in front of a billion global viewers is a crescendo of protest from a section of Britain who've had it easy for so long they've forgotten what intelligent criticism looks like: Boyle lifted that rock on Friday and look what's emerged blinking in the light.
First off the block was Tory MP Aidan Burley whose instinctive reaction to the Olympics spectacle was to decry the inclusion of all those ethnic minorities that make up the fabric of Britain as "leftie multi-cultural crap". He was quite speedy with his now notorious Tweet, while for his spiritual bredren it's been like watching a dinosaur kicked in the tail and struggling to work out what's just happened, proving that Burley's brain-stem reflex is in better new world order than his mates.
Although Rupert Murdoch sensed political correctness, he is far too sly an old fox to express anything other than graciousness. (Watch out, Danny, your card may have been marked!)
Unlike a host of ill-wishing Tweeters such as @toadmeister Toby Young who saw "a £27 million Party Political Broadcast for the Labour Party," and Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) who "Found the torch ceremony truly unpleasant and deeply unsettling. Paganistic crowd manipulation" and described the whole show as "a piss-take of a lefty wet dream".
The climax of all this fear of "Other" was the hate-fuelled piece that stood out from some otherwise quite decent coverage in the Daily Mail online. “This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up."
On and on it went in the same unhinged vein until the inevitable complaints prompted someone on the paper to do a heavy edit. However, polishing a turd doesn't make it any less of one.
Apart from those of us of a duskier hue and less-abled being represented, what was it that disturbed the complacency of our dinosaurs so much? "Spelling out 'NHS' is an ideological statement, like spelling out 'Marxism'." said one Tweet. "The UKshould be celebrating our traditions and heritage, not nutty socialism." said another. Who'd have thought that anyone with fellow human feelings could find the wonder that is universal healthcare — a fine British invention — so upsetting? Or assume that the notion of public ownership in an equitable organisation of society for the good of everyone is not part of our tradition and heritage?
I suppose that depends on whose tradition and heritage you mean.
To think that I'd fully expected another stitch-up for the launch, such was the utter bottom-scraping build-up, as with the governments (Labour and Coalition) who sold our democratic civil rights to the lowest bidders in order to secure the 2012 games. For all I knew, Boyle might have been another chancer just like the former health and prime ministers, now carving up the NHS for their privatised personal gain. Or the ex-Home Secretary who's now a director of G4S and running the largest private army in the world.
Or he could have been a vacuous TV showbiz mogul and given us a variation on the dismal Jubilee concert, or made an idiotic attempt to out-extravaganza Beijing on a quarter of the budget during a recession.
Instead, Boyle pulled a people's Olympics opener out of the jaws of the plundering class who'd hijacked our games and tried to rip us off at every turn. (It's only through the efforts of organisations such as 38 Degrees that some of the sponsors have been pressured into abandoning their avoidance of paying their fair share of tax.)
The opening ceremony transcended party politics and took us back to root values.
In an age where the media shamefully allows lies to go unchallenged every time a supine minister or businessman caught with his hand in the till says, "Look over there", Boyle's cri de couer is refreshing. The Tory narrative that we are skint and the poor have to pay for the bankers' continuing excesses while the Sunday Times top 1000 is worth £440bn and corporate profits are at an all-time high is surely the sort of "crowd manipulation" a principled media should be challenging.
Instead it serves up the same dead-head business class in order to naturalise a status quo where the rest of us are fodder. How often do you see or hear a trade unionist or a working-class representative with the same pundit rights as Mary Portas, the Dragons' Den gargoyles, Alan Sugar, Secret Millionaires, abusive celebrity chefs, Simon Cowell and the whole finger-wagging, knife-wielding shouty gamut of grotesques now laying down the law at every level in our culture?
When Boyle decided to have the Olympics torch entry to the stadium flanked by the thousands of workers who built it, he was saying a big screw you to the business chiefs who Pollard, Young, Burley et al would have had celebrated on this occasion rather than their workers: the construction bosses who sneer at 'elf and safety, who destroy lives and blacklist anyone with enough of a conscience to seek to make the industry safer. You have more chance of dying on a British construction site than you do in Afghanistan.
Interesting that one slip of the mask can elicit such a howl of agony. The liberal press is unable to offer an analysis and, unlike the right, seems oblivious to the case being made, producing instead meaningless drivel like this.
On Friday, Boyle shone a searchlight allowing us to take stock of where we are now. The elegy was beautiful but we should do something to halt what he flagged up as being lost.
There are two great things to have come out of the London Olympics so far: the Thames cable car and the knowledge that there are still some brilliant people who can carve out a bit of space for the rest of us.
Hopefully we've all seen the BBC Newsnight clip (above) and signed the petition demanding an apology for serious misrepresentation of Shanene Thorpe, portraying her as a benefit scrounger.
What started off innocently enough as an investigation into "what it's like being a working mum struggling to pay rent and housing costs" turned into an interrogation with political editor Allegra Stratton as chief inquisitor and Shanene as one of the irresponsible unemployed who should be living with her child in her mother's two-bed flat.
Shanene is, in fact, a working mother who pays taxes and can't make enough from her job at Tower Hamlets Council to house herself and her children. Like many others, she is dependent on the state to support her landlord – there being a decided lack of public housing in these here parts – but you don't see many of them put through the wringer.
The questions which should have been asked: where is the social housing and where are the decent liveable wages?
Allegra Stratton has been a reporter I've generally trusted, so it's difficult to know whether the final cut of the piece is the work of an editor with an agenda or simply that of a wealthy woman sufficiently privileged to lack any notion of what it's like to have to struggle to make ends meet.
However, there's a bigger issue here than a journalist exploiting and humiliating a young woman: in the current economic climate, the media is simply serving as a shill for the ruling classes when they act like this While the bankers run riot, stealing everything that isn't nailed down, have we noticed an upsurge in demonising the very people who are being made to pay?
Owen Jones's book Chavs makes us all aware of what malicious forces exactly we are invoking when we hurl that "c" word around. But the upholders of the status quo are shapeshifters, mutating and changing tack, coming at the working class from different angles, undermining our understanding of how the world works and turning us into rats in a sack. Because, while we're fighting each other, our eyes are off the culprits who got us into this mess and continue to wreck lives.
Former Newsnight reporter Greg Palast is, thankfully, not in the same mould. Rather than kiss up and kick down, Palast takes on the powerful and puts them under the scrutiny that Allegra reserves for young women with no social or economic power.
In his new book, Vultures' Picnic, we see the pattern take hold across the world. In countries from Brazil and Ecuador to Greece, the World Trade Organisation acts as the battering ram for deregulation of the banks, smashing up economies and privatising state assets. The World Bank makes demands on the beleaguered governments to impose brutal budget cuts and policies on their own people such as raising the price of cooking-oil in Ecuador thirty-fold.
The women in Ecuador who protested on the streets, banging their cooking pots, were quickly silenced (although the story of how their government broke ranks with other underling nations and fought back successfully is a fascinating section in Palast's book). The Greeks are blamed for what damage the banks wrought, not the rich who didn't pay their taxes; the British working classes are bashed for daring to have decent pensions and public sector wages. It is all the victims' fault.
And it blinds us to what's happening in the highest echelons. Palast cites economist Joe Stiglitz as seeing "despots turning World Bank privatization programmes into bribery free-for-alls ('briberisation,' Stiglitz called it), cruel demands on nations begging for food (Ethiopia still bothers him), and the Bank's pathological desire to tear down finance regulations in nations that barely had finances."
They even anticipated the social unrest that would inevitably follow the rape of entire economies and prescribed methods to crush revolt. Stiglitz: 'We had a name for it: the IMF riot. ... They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up."
Palast continues, "And we could see the squeeze, explosion, and crackdown repeated from Greece to Thailand."
According to this year's Sunday Times Rich List, the top 1,000 in Britain are worth over £400 BILLION and their profits have risen since 2009, so the tired old mantra that there's not enough cash in the kitty simply won't not do. In fact, it's just plain old-fashioned lying.
Shanene finds herself collateral damage in the lie-spinning. But, like Ecuador and Brazil, she's fighting back and deserves all our warmest respect and support.
Like the song goes: It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.
A little bit of sympathy at the back, there. Puh-leaze. Let's be 'aving yew. At the Leveson inquiry The cruellest moment is when Sir Paul Stephenson, The poor put-upon former chief bill Hobbles in on crutches and drops a pill, Cutting a pathetic sight Under the assembled legal might. So small for a tall man, Bespectacled nerd Pinched lips, he can barely cope. Only a thug like a lawyer Would punch well-honed words At a man on the ropes.
He says: I may be public watchdog eyes and ears but I wasn't there, never heard a thing, Couldn't see, except for what the reptiles did to Lord Ian Blair Stripped bare in the glare of The Sun And that wasn't going to happen to me.
A loose-lipped minority gossiped In a distracting dialogue of disharmony, Dysfunctional, too close for my liking. But I couldn't do a thing, not a thing.
Ever so humbly, you are Crediting me with a level of analysis I don't have I didn't give it any particular thought No conclusions can be wrought. It was just something that happened. Like The Sun coming up in the morning Shedding light on the scum we turned over. I am not fawning but we don't investigate someone we know socially and with whom we are friends. Except when we did the police officers. A big boy done it and ran away And stopped us realising there was anything wrong When he told us there was no new hack sore. We adopted a defensive mindset instead of a challenging stance I can see that now. It was a cursory glance Not wide, not deep. We were asleep. If only we had the wisdom of hindsight and weren't caught out it would all be all right.
I'm not throwing my colleague out of the back of the sleigh and I can't answer for him but It would have been wiser presentationally For him to have done it different. But he is away in Bahrain and you aren't getting him back in Old Blighty Until the heat is off, Until you call off the dogs, Until the trail has chilled like the champagne we quaffed as we doffed. Defending and not challenging, That was the error of our ways. We are brave and did not back off, guv, Just because it was News International.
We were logical and needed the polaroids Coz the tapes and diaries in Glenn's black bags were not enough. It was the Bahrain runaway who did not reopen the enquiry He failed, it is regrettable. That's tough. Fear of taking on a powerful enterprise is not the case. I did not put the frighteners on the Guardian editor, Or spray him with Mace, Or rough him up too much. Politics over substance I merely turned up to understand. But there was no meeting of minds, My pulse did not race. You could not get off your face with him Unlike the real press, proper gents we could have a laugh with Over a drink and a nice dinner. Call it folly but Mr Wallis was generous with the Bolly And Yates of the Yard was fond of his jollies. I just did not get it and wasn't keeping tally, The Met caught Chlamedia off Wallis by getting too pally But we gave him Cressida Dick.
A lack of evidence beyond the lone rogue reporter Meant rationed resources and an underfunded force Would not be deployed as a matter of course. Please give us more dosh if you wish us to wield the cosh. I was overworked with anti-terrorism, The Olympics, Not my decision A junior did it and is sunning himself in sandy climes. I am an ill man, I need a week in a spa. Can you recommend one?
And so they adjourn for another time.
But spare a thought for the thin blue line. Poor Raisa, disappeared, turned to glue, Currently starring in a pet food can near you To stop her singing like a canary, Squealing like a pig at an inquiry. Take the porkers she carried; She knew Cameron's arse inside and out, Blue heart and stout, Fullsome about Coulson, He put it about, Withdrew when the thin blue sphincter tightened, Purged the toad and found his load lightened. Raisa rode bravely into the student throngs they harried Righting a wrong for the Right, Got the stomach for a fight when protesters say neigh And you weigh as much as ten of them With a bobby on your back. Truncheoned before luncheon Unfree by tea Scuppered before supper A hack for the hacks The sack for the lax When they are found out Her hooves are all over this but her head is in some mogul's bed.
Anna Chen 5th March 2012
Boris Johnson and his assistant Kit Malthouse in the frame
