Nigel's refugee clawback shows he's just another politician

As the year ends, spare a thought for a group of Britons whose hopes and dreams have been crushed. A group who will continue to be ridiculed, ignored and oppressed, even by those who once promised them Jerusalem itself.

Of course, I'm talking about the poor members of UKIP, who upon hearing of their leader Nigel Farage claim that the UK should 'welcome Syrian refugees', came up in arms (at least on their Keyboards) to denounce the act of treachery.

“You're a shill, just like the rest of 'em” said one man on the party's official Facebook account. “Charity begins at home, let's start here first!” said another. In fact, since Farage made the statement last Sunday, the party's page has been filled with reactions similar to another rattled up member, who eloquently put it: “They can sort out their own shite”.

Admittedly, I was quite impressed by Farage's statement. Perhaps because I'm a liberal Britain hater by UKIP's standards, but the fact that he was able to justify the proposition under the United Nations 1951 declaration on Refugee status illustrated a certain maturity of the party- one that's hard time shaking off negative images of racism and under-informed policy.  

It also said something about Farage's character. Arguably the most charismatic man in modern British politics (with London mayor Boris Johnson a close second), Farage has always been known for his defiant speeches at the European parliament, an unrelenting stance to the European union, and generally achieving what most politicians can't- being rather good on TV. I half expected that the man likely to lead the 2014 elections would have the resilience to do what was morally right, even if a section of his party weren't too chipper about it.

But yesterday, Farage retracted his initial statement, stating that he actually meant Syrian Christians (otherwise known as 'the good ones'). Beyond the sheer offensiveness of the comment- and the inherent implication that religion is an accurate determinant of one's life, it's worth thinking about what this actually says about Farage himself.

Bear in mind that a significant part of the Farage 'brand' lies in marketing himself as an outsider- the 'honest broker' in a land of crooks- something that his supporters often lament in when they talk about 'spineless' politicians. Indeed, just type his name into Youtube, and you'll find plenty of videos attacking the 'LibLabCon' establishment, claiming that the party 'best represents the working class' through addressing its concerns around immigration. Essentially, the Farage brand has been constructed as the antithesis of mainstream politics, accommodating viewpoints that Liberals, Conservatives or Labour could never acceptably get away with.

Farage has been able to get away with this 'free pass' for a while, and it's allowed a great deal of inconsistency in the process. Prior to his statement to help Syrian refugees, he referred to the UK as a 'soft touch' for trickster asylum seekers, while the party's flagship policy, the 5 year immigration freeze, has generally gone unchallenged by the mainstream press.

Meanwhile, its campaigners and supporters seem to pay little attention to its policies outside of immigration and the EU; Indeed, it still confuses me that a party that calls for corporation tax cuts, meanwhile statements made by the party's former economics spokesman, a certain Godfrey Bloom, has been on the record claiming that the unemployed and public sector workers should be 'stripped of their voting rights'.

Perhaps the issue is that we don't really know what Farage stands for. Once a strength, his dream of UKIP becoming a formidable force in British politics is coming with consequences- notably, a greater demand for accountability. That might mean Farage will have to stop playing the political maverick, and act more like a politician.

Whether Farage believes his revised statement, is of course questionable. But what this obvious scaling back does show is that even without a Westminster seat, he knows that he requires a core foundation of votes to even stand a chance in the next election. And being a self-cultivated brand, he might find that defying the congregation is much more difficult.

*An interesting comment piece : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10542611/Does-Nigel-Farage-want-to-join-the-Conservatives.html

The 'gender segregation' debate has ignored Muslim women

It turns out that British Universities are further bowing to Shariah Law (at least according to some bloggers) by 'enabling' gender segregation. The issue comes in light of a recent report by UniversitiesUK (now retracted) suggesting that 'gender separation is not alien to our culture'.

There's been enough columns denouncing forced separation by gender; pretty much every national newspaper, magazine and digital news outlet have argued that such requests are akin to coercion, demean freedom and equality, and may even suggest that religious sensitivities have taken precedence in secular institutions.

Generally I agree with the sentiments; I personally don't believe segregation achieves what it is designed for, nor is it particularly great for the purposes of public intellectual inquiry. I also feel that a lot of Islamic societies across the country will bear the brunt of rash accusations; my own university's Islamic Society (ISOC) didn't do segregation in public debates, and neither did the others I attended as a guest.

But I do believe that Muslim women have been short-changed in this highly publicised debate- particularly when it came to media reporting. For while representatives of LSE's atheist & secular society, Student Rights and IERA were given air time- the opinions of ISOC attendees- particularly Muslim women, were given much less attention. And if we are to seriously have a debate or impose terms like 'patriarchy', 'misogyny' and 'medieval' , then it's probably not the best idea to shut out the people who have been portrayed as the victims in all of this.

I decided to speak to three Muslim women over the weekend. All, who wish to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, are students at London universities, where they play active roles in their Islamic societies.

During the interviews, what surprised me was how they viewed the separation by gender, an Islamic custom that is observed by pretty much all Mosques across the world. Soumaiya, a 20 year-old engineering student said to me : "I'm uncomfortable with the term 'segregation' because it implies force. None of us were forced to sit away from males, it was a choice that we made- one that we're actually more comfortable with."

Over the course of our correspondence, we talked further about Islam and feminism, where she went on to say: "This whole debate is a lot like the issues regarding the Hijab (headscarf) and the Niqab (veil). One the one hand you have a group of people arguing that it supresses women into acceptance and submission. On the other, a growing wave of feminist Muslims are using it to empower themselves, and to build gender identities on their own terms.

"To me this is the same thing. I don't agree that people should be forced to do anything, but if I feel more comfortable sitting alone, or with fellow women, then why should I be told it's wrong? Isn't it all a bit counter-intuitive?"

Halima agrees. A 19 year old Mathematics student and former treasurer of her Islamic society, she says: "A lot of the arguments flung around talk about how sitting separated reinforces patriarchy and male superiority, but no-one really asks what the females think. It's ironic really- they complain that girls in Islam are ignored and unrecognised, and then they completely ignore them when discussing gender rights!"

That's not to say that all Muslim women- or even men- find the current system of segregation to be perfect. Indeed, as young, liberally-educated Muslims go to UK universities, they often have a mindset which is at odds with old-school preachers and culturally dogmatic ways of thinking. Noor, a Chemistry student from my alma mater tells me: "Segregation the way that it's currently done might not work as intended, because the disparity between the Isoc and the outside world are polar opposites.

"How can you be in an environment where you have total separation in Islamic events, and then you're forced to mix and interact with the opposite gender outside? Sitting at the back of a room won't improve the way that anyone interacts with the opposite sex- in some cases it might make it even worse."

Noor also tells me that ISOCs do need to develop in order to address the key issues surrounding gender segregation suggesting that they need to create a space where "boundaries exist, because they are part of a wider principles that we believe in and are embedded within us and not because they are enforced by a sign that says "brothers left and sisters right".

This leaves the question of whether gender segregation is 'legitimate' in British universities. I'd argue that while I don't believe an external speaker should be able to dictate terms of a public event (and this would apply whether it's race, socio-economic disposition or political affiliation) and nor should people be forced into arrangements without their consent, there is also something to be said about respecting choices regardless of how distasteful we might find them. Such is the libertarian position of Legal theorist David Bernstein, who explains in his paper ["Sex Discrimination Laws Versus Civil Liberties”] that "guarding the freedom of choice for men and women is more important than preventing such sex segregation since methods of prevention can often cause more harm than good for both sexes."

To conclude- hastily, I do think that the debate surrounding gender segregation on British campuses, while important, has been poorly debated on. There has been far less discussion, particularly from female viewpoints, on the values of choice, liberty, religious identity and legitimate boundaries of self expression. Instead, we've heard far more misogynistic assumptions from Islamic groups who have been given a platform to speak on gender rights, and commentators that have fallen into the same trap of pushing forward a dogmatic and incorruptible strand of liberalism.

Even if campaigners ultimately succeed in preventing societies from holding events where segregation is permitted, I fear that it will, unfortunately, do little to advance the gender equality of female Muslim students.

How the police and senior management are trampling on student dissent

nus.org.uk

The news that Michael Chessum, president of the University of London Union (ULU) was arrested earlier this week under section 11 of the Public Order Act 1989 is the latest event in a series of efforts to quell dissent on UK university campuses. It further illustrates a worrying trend in the future of student politics as well as the fate of public universities themselves.

Under S.11, the police had every right to arrest Chessum on the grounds that he had failed to give prior notice of the demonstration, held to counter management's continuing plan of dismantling the largest students' union in Europe, opting instead to outsource services and dilute both accessibility and public accountability for its students.

Yet the claim rests on shaky grounds, for several reasons. First, as reported by the London Review of Books,  Chessum was arrested almost immediately after his meeting with a member of senior management, who had previously written to him advising: ‘review your personal and institutional responsibilities and liabilities in leading protesters into physical danger and unlawful action'. While the University of London claim they have nothing to do with the protest, complains from union staffers suggest that the correspondence might amount to a clear threat taken in this context.

There's a bigger issue at hand, however; an ongoing trend in which authorities have actively clamped down on student dissidence in campuses across the country- and have gotten away with it.

Consider that even after the 2010 student protests in London, the metropolitan police continue to taunt students with letters 'reminding' them not to engage in 'disruptive, anti-social behaviour as Farah-Al-Nahda reports.  The crackdown hasn't just been limited to mass protests either. Just a few months ago, another student at the University of London was arrested for a 'chalk protest' highlighting the University's aims at altering levels of pay to outsourced low-wage cleaners.

That isn't all, of course. On the same day that Chessum was arrested, secret footage published by The Guardian showed that the police were attempting to bribe students at Cambridge University into spying on activists on the campus. According to the tapes, the police weren't just searching for activists who may pose a risk to national security, but rather 'union-stuff', as "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues."

While Chessum has now been released from Holborn police station, he, as have the rest of union members, has been banned from staging any more protests on any of the London campuses until further notice. Meanwhile, the University of London will continue the plans to disband ULU, only this time with little threat of resistance.

Finally- it's worth reading this piece on OpenDemocracy.net. It's an interesting article on the uses and abuses of security services in our universities, and the ways in which other forms of protests- including those against arms manufacturers, are also being trodden on.

What this says about how universities are changing is debatable, though the way I see it, arbitrary arrests, gagging orders and the increased erosion of transparency make it clear that public institutions are becoming more corporate, less accountable to their student bodies and disturbingly, more welcome on campuses.

Some thoughts on Journalism

It’s been a while since I last went on a school trip- especially one that didn’t involve asking middle-aged mums from Kent about parking in their dreary town centers.

As part of the NCTJ course (an accredited journalism training programme) that I’m taking at Lambeth College, I had the opportunity to attend the Society of Editor’s conference, an annual meeting of the industry’s top editorial staff, freedom of information campaigners and veteran journalists, to discuss the most pressing issues that currently faces journalists working in the print medium. The day consisted of panel debates relating to reforms in press regulations, the relationships between journalists and the police as well as the conduct of ‘responsible journalism’- and how to address the balance between reporting and national security.

There’s a collection of really good blogs (most by fellow Lambeth students) here

While I won’t go through each of the debates with a fine comb (the blogs do have more details regarding them anyway)  I thought it might be worth highlighting the key points from the conference, which may help those working in the industry, or others wanting to join it.

 ‘Journalism is changing’
A point that almost everyone knows in theory, but not so much in practice.

Journalism is going through a transition stage at the moment. While the UK still has a very healthy amount of newspapers and magazines in circulation, the medium of mass printing is dying; in other words, people are less likely to spend a large % of their daily income on newspapers.

As the Press Gazette reports here most national printed papers have seen a rapid decline in their readership in less than a decade- in part because of steep increases in price, but more because news is more accessible- and free- online.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s keynote address made this quite clear, stating that the biggest challenges facing the press were that of advertising revenues and monetizing content. At the same time, she said that the challenge of the local press came from larger institutions like the BBC, who could lift local content and broadcast it to a much wider audience. 

In this case, the ‘media’ face a number of problems at once;

(a) To reassert its relevance to local and national democracy.
(b) To build better brands, particularly on digital platforms
(c) To compete against bigger agencies and broadcasters with larger audiences
(d) To find the funding needed to continue journalistic practice.

Proposed regulations aren't ideal- but it might be better than the alternatives

 I’ve blogged previously on why the Royal Charter would dilute the roles and responsibilities of the press- something I still believe. But the conference did hold a terrific debate on how journalists might work under the new system.

The panel discussion- which featured  the Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti and Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke, highlighted the difficulty for British journalists in acquiring information. One example given related to the difficulty she had in getting information relating to MPs expenses- which the Telegraph eventually broke thanks to a whistleblower. Brooke said: “Information that should be in the public domain t is suppressed and it creates a sort of black market”

Chakrabarti said she had no desire for ‘absolute transparency’, acknowledging that secrecy was essential for a state to protect its national interests, but also argued that there was a need for oversight and public accountability, saying that in our current state, security services “wanted no secrecy for us, and no accountability for them.”

The question is, under a new regulatory model, how free are journalists to do investigative work?

As editor of the Press Gazette Dominic Ponsford argues, the Press Complaints Commission’s new incarnation, the Indepdendent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) may be the ‘best worst solution’ on the table. The stick behind the PCC’s replacement is coercion to the newspapers, which comes from harsh pay-outs by newspapers in libel cases. However, as many of the oversight bodies will only really change in name, and publishers will still oversee the conduct of journalism, there are some who argue that this is far more desirable than a Royal Charter.

That said, the Media Standards Trust aren’t too happy, as Gordon Ramsay, researcher at the LSE media project shows.

 Monetising media is still uncharted territory

Paywalls, re-branding, going digital etc. Lots of ideas on how to make journalism pay (important for budding reporters), no real agreements on how to do it. A panel debate featuring the Sun’s new editor David Dinsmore and Peter Barron, former editor of  BBC Newsnight, argued their methods of making journalism pay.

I won’t go into this as it’s quite long winded, but my personal opinion would be that paywalls are likely to become the default setting of most media outlets. The debate will then shift from one of ‘how to pay journalists’ to a more diverse one on the balance between monetizing content and easing access to information for the public.