Here is a dispatch from the north-east by Andrew Hankinson, one of the best feature writers around, who wrote a superb piece on the effects of the crash of 2008 on the young.
It sums up one of my worries about Labour’s awful response to David Cameron’s speech on the need to revive liberal values. It is not just that Labour was refusing to defend liberal
Muslims in their struggle against reactionaries, or that Labour was making itself ridiculous by refusing to take a stand against Islamic Forum Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood and other vicious
outfits, but it showed that the party was impaling itself on a fork. If it cannot stand up against Islamist groups that are racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-democratic, how can it argue in
conscience against the BNP and EDL? Will Labour only oppose the rhetoric of ultra-reaction when men with white skins propagate it?
Andrew watched the shadow cabinet’s visit to Newcastle last week. Here’s what he had to say:
‘There was a report about the EDL on Newsnight on Tuesday. It was predictable: a reporter films EDL members getting drunk in the hope that one of them will say something unpleasant like
Paki. Then Jeremy Paxman lamely quoted from Facebook and blithely dismissed complaints about Sharia councils (would we accept all-male judges making decisions about the lives of white women?). We
know the EDL and BNP are unpleasant. It’s not enough to just say that. It’s not enough to be smug about catching them out a couple of times. Their complaints need to be properly
addressed and argued against.
Up here on Tyneside the BNP is campaigning against a listed building, used as the setting for BBC series Byker Grove, from being converted into an Islamic school. They’ve printed leaflets and got hundreds of supporting signatures. They’ve nicknamed it Burka Grove. But when I write about it, I’ll skip past the vocal idiots in the BNP and instead find out why the school doesn’t want to educate non-Muslims, why non-Muslims are signing up to the BNP rather than forming alternative opposition, then I’ll see if more thought from both sides might lead to a compromise.
The media and politicians need to accept that the BNP and EDL are campaigning on popular issues and it’s dangerous that very few try to defeat them by engaging in a debate. Instead they
transparently make inarticulate, uneducated people look stupid and that turns people against the journalists more than it turns them against the BNP or EDL.
By the way, I went to watch Ed Miliband launch his ‘Fresh ideas’ campaign at the Sage music hall in Gateshead. It was lame. There were around 200 people there for the Q&A. Ed Balls
showed up Ed Miliband by being a much better speaker. It was all so flabby and limp. Miliband only became engaging when someone proposed a two-tier NHS – he’s so much better at
defending traditional Labour principles than he is at illustrating any kind of future. The audience was very soft, bemoaning the increase in tuition fees and the cuts. I just sat there thinking
that only a mile away several men filmed themselves burning the Koran in a pub car park. Across the river the BNP is campaigning against a school. And there is latent racism all over Tyneside. If
Miliband just went to the local factories, colleges and sports halls and explained to people why they should fight racism rather than support it, he’d get a much better media profile and be
doing something much more worthwhile.
Then he could also talk to the people at those venues about education and the economy and jobs. But instead he half-heartedly answered questions from mildly interested invitees (who he insisted on
calling by their first name no matter how senior they were) in Lord Foster’s Sage. Where’s the leadership in that?
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