I knew from the day the first train departed 5 years behind schedule that I didn’t like the Elizabeth line. Without a doubt, it is technically superior to its sister lines: it’s air conditioned, faster, and isn’t noisier than the legal workplace limit. But so what? Like the superhero films of the last decade, it pays for its technical excellence with character and charm.
The Lizzie doesn’t force you to arch your back if you stand too close to the doors like the Picadilly’s 1973 stock, built small enough to squeeze through the narrow, round deep level tunnels bored by the Victorians. It doesn’t have padded cushions like the Bakerloo’s 1972 stock. Not only are the cushioned seats more comfortable, but you can gain deep pleasure by sitting down hard and launching the person sitting next to you into the hot, polluted air. There are no flickering lights on the capital’s newest line, caused by intermittent contact with the power line. The Elizabeth line’s lights are reliable, dependable, helpful, and oh, so boring. But worst of all, it’s not even a tube. What sort of name for a metro system is The Rectangle?
The higher level cut-and-cover lines like the District and Circle are also guilty of having a more square profile, but these trains at least try to be a part of the tube network. They share the familiar blue, red and white colour schemes, and a slightly smaller, more humble profile. They know they aren’t mainline trains. The Elizabeth line has other notions. Consequently, it looks like any other train in the world. It replaces claustrohobic compartments separated from each other with two doors and a nice, dangerous gap with a long, agorophobic walkway, removing all calamity from walking the length of the train. It replaces the deafening trundle of the imprecise wheels made during the 3 day weeks of the 1970s with the inane gossip of the bumpkins from Essex sitting next to you. I don’t want to breathe fresh, cool air. I want to squash up next to a pungent commuter on the Central line and complain about it to myself. Like the nuclear bomb, the Elizabeth line proves that progress for progress’s sake is a grave mistake.
The tube is an iconic part of London. Being the first (non-metaphorical) underground railway in the world, it’s full of unique quirks resulting from experimentation, and from the integration of different lines built by different private companies. There’s no other metro like it in the world. Its oldest trains are as old as my parents, but they still function. Rather eloquently in fact. Building more Elizabeth lines rather than more Picadilly lines would be like replacing Big Ben with a digital clock; an act of cultural terrorism which assaults the very essence of London. But I fear that the Elizabeth line is the first of many lines in a city which isn’t London. Sadly, like its regal namesake, I suspect it will run for almost a century to come, and there won’t be a day it wouldn’t be better off on the block.
Notably, another icon of London, the tube map, gives the silent treatment to the Elizabeth line. It, as we all do, knows the latter does not belong in London.
Queen Elizabeth, sovereign of the United Kingdom, has died at 96.
Her death was announced by the state-controlled news broadcaster this evening, as part of a finely choreographed routine which is known to have been rehearsed for many years. The newsreader, expressing grief in the understated way customary in the infamously taciturn Kingdom, spoke slowly and softly, his voice appearing to croak, with a subtle but clear frown etched on his face – one wonders the consequences for failing to show his grief appropriately.
The Queen ruled from a young age, being thrust by her father’s abdication into her new role as Queen of the Realm and Defender of the Faith — the Queen being not only Monarch, but also head of the national religion, a minor sect of Christianity. Distancing herself form her family’s associations with Nazism, the Queen cast herself as a modern head of state, becoming known for her frequent official visits to countries formerly occupied by the British Empire. Many of these nations, still scarred from subjugation, question their continued allegiance.
The Island nation, recently politically isolated from mainland Europe, will mourn for 10 days, with state approved unions cancelling planned strikes, cultural and sporting events cancelled, the weather service issuing only one update per day, and the television regulator requiring networks to broadcast only “tasteful” programming.
According to the traditions of the United Kingdom, the Monarch is hereditary, coming from a family chosen by God to rule over the land. As portraits of the late ruler are displayed on streets throughout the country, plans begin to replace her likeness with that of her son, on stamps, currency, even food packaging.
The late Monarch, head of the Kingdom’s armed forces, made one final journey by military aircraft from one of her countryside estates in the north of the country to her official residence in the south.
Privately, the royal distraction may come as a relief to some in the ruling party, which has governed for 80 of the past 100 years. An aggressive economic war with its cold war rival Russia, combined with record energy prices and rampant inflation, have led to anger and despair among the people. Opposition groups say they plan to boycott excessive energy bills, and demand that the government impose rent controls on the country’s bloated private rental system. The government’s response, via the state news channel: ‘not important now.’
The government, which has so far resisted calls to implement a republic with an elected head of state, has also experienced internal turmoil, churning through 4 prime ministers since 2015. The newly appointed prime minister, elected only by party members, may seek to engineer patriotic feeling over the coming months, as she attempts to politically outlive her recent predecessors.
As the divided country’s two largest TV channels play 24 hour rolling footage of the royal succession, the message to the people is clear: ‘God save the king.’
I made the counter-intuitive discovery recently that the more time I liberate for myself, the less I achieve. If I save myself 5 hours a week by giving up a voluntary job, the time isn’t redirected to something useful, like studying for exams, or even to something semi-useful, like increasing the frequency of these blogposts. No, the time becomes lost, disappeared into the void like accountability in the Johnson government, or the year 2020. It would seem intuitive that the more time I make for the important things, the more important things I’ll get done, yet it isn’t so. Now we segue into the point I’m getting at.
It’s a fundamental principle of our justice system that it’s better to let a guilty person walk free than to condemn and punish an innocent person. This principle means that in the UK, a person is extremely unlikely to go to prison for a crime they didn’t commit (NB: being arrested and questioned for a crime, or being stopped and searched, is another matter, the burden of proof is much lower. Also, there are many crimes which it can be argued shouldn’t be crimes. Half of all women are in prison for non-payment of fines, for example. But what’s certain is that someone in prison is extremely likely to have committed the crime they were accused of, whether that should be a crime or not). It also means we have one of the lowest imprisonment rates in the world, albeit one of the highest in Europe.
But protecting the innocent from imprisonment comes at a price. Guilty people walk away scot free for crimes they did commit. Sometimes everyone knows they committed the crime. The police may have bungled the investigation, tampered with the evidence, or handed the defence team some other get out of jail free card. Sometimes, the prosecution simply can’t meet the strict burden of proof required of them to convince a jury of someone’s certain guilt. When a blatant wrong ‘un is let off the hook, it’s invariably interpreted as a failure of the justice system; in cases of a rapist escaping prosecution or conviction, it’s interpreted as evidence of a very male justice system protecting a fellow man; when a politician or policeman gets off the hook, it’s the establishment protecting its own. I argue that, most of the time, the justice system works just as intended. The strict burden of proof required of the prosecution isn’t designed to protect the guilty, it’s designed to protect the innocent, and, usually, it does.
The intuition, then, might be to increase sentences, bring back hanging, and make prisons a worse place to be. If we can’t get every guilty person, at least we can really nail the bastards we do get, and this will surely deter future criminals. I believe, counter-intuitively, this would have the opposite effect. Consider this: if the reason we require such a high burden of proof to convict someone is to protect innocent people from the harmful effects of criminal conviction, surely we would require an even higher burden of proof if the harmful effects of criminal conviction were made more harmful still. The burden of proof for hanging someone must be greater than the burden of proof for locking them in a cage for 10 years. Higher sentences and harsher punishments would result in more guilty people walking free, not less.
So, it seems I’m arguing for shorter sentences and more lenient punishments. And if so, the obvious counter-argument would be this: what’s the point in convicting a criminal anyway, if they’re only going to get a couple of years in Hôtel Pentonville? With the attention span of an Instagram scroller in mind, and because I have a shed to build, I shan’t write my entire thesis here, but I will outline in short why I’m right.
The United States, ever serving as an example of how not to run a country, has the largest prison population ever to exist, yet has the highest murder rate of all countries which haven’t had a civil war or military government in the last 50 years. European countries, conversely, have lower murder rates and more lenient prison sentences. Long and harsh sentences seem to be a reaction to, but not a solution to, high crime.
If, on the other hand, criminals weren’t branded for life with their record, preventing them from securing employment and housing, isolating them from society; if criminals weren’t locked in a cage, wasting years of their life, but rather went through a rehabilitative system, designed to integrate, not isolate, then it wouldn’t matter if an innocent person were accidentally convicted. Conviction rates would increase, and more people would see justice done.
Primarily, of course, the focus should be on prevention of crime. Crime isn’t about good people and bad people, but about the environment in which people live. The difference between people in the UK and people in El Salvador, one of the most violent places in the world, isn’t genetics, but the conditions in which the residents of the two countries live. Those conditions aren’t changed by harsh punishment for crime. No crime, whether theft, vandalism, or murder, is compensated for by a prison sentence, whether 10, 20 or 40 years (I think you can see the particular case I’m referring to). That doesn’t mean there’s no place for locking someone in a cage for a portion of their life, but when there’s no indication that it has any deterrent effect or rehabilitating effect, it shouldn’t be the primary focus of a justice system. To make it the primary focus obscures the true solutions. Better to think counter-intuitively.
In my nine years in London, I’ve only had three close shaves with crime. When I was 15, some kids who probably weren’t much older than me made an attempt to liberate my bike from its stand. I witnessed this attempted theft from a distance and, as one of the teens began to walk towards me, I diverted course and paced quickly away to safety—in fact, I realised in retrospect, I had paced quickly into the heart of the most infamous council estate in the area, which by this time was almost entirely abandoned and an ideal spot for mugging a naive adolescent; being a countryside kid, my streetwise knowledge began and ended with how to avoid upsetting a stray bull. After a few minutes, I tentatively returned to the crime scene and discovered my bike was still present, lock unharmed. On my way home, I passed by the prospective thieves, and one of them remarked “I told you it was his.” Aside from a couple of similar incidents, I reached adulthood unscathed.
By the time I was 20, 6’2” with my boots on, stubble almost filling in, a bit more experienced with life in the city, I felt as comfortable after dark as during the day. I don’t think twice about walking to a 24 hour shop at 2am for Bombay mix to eat the night away. After a night out, I don’t waste money on an Uber when I can just nip across a park to get home. If I’m going through a rare and blissful period of motivation, I’ll even go for a pointless run at 2am. If I need to talk on the phone in privacy, I’ll leave home and walk aimlessly as I talk until I get lost; I don’t care very much where I end up.
On the rare occasions when I have been anxious, and walked a bit faster, it wasn’t women I was afraid of.
There are 3.4 thousand women in prison in Britain, most of whom committed non-violent offences. This compares with 77.4 thousand men, who are responsible for the vast majority of violent crime, and make up 95% of the prison population. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violent offences, but they’re also most likely to be responsible. It’s true to say not all men, but, within a margin of error of 5%, it’s fair to say only men.
There are two popular responses to the murder of Sarah Everard. The first is a reminder to women of all the safety precautions they’re already aware of: tell people where you are, have an emergency number ready to dial if you feel unsafe, etc. The second response is a rightful and adamant refusal to accept these conditions of effective imprisonment in an open air jail. But the demand married to this defiance is much more meagre: men must stop being violent. Well, ok, and what? It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at both geography books and history books to see that violence, whatever inherent roots it has in the male psyche, varies as much with time and location as it does with gender. This should be a relief. It’s patently obvious that asking men to stop being violent won’t change things. But the stark difference in violence between, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, or between the United States and the United Kingdom, tells us there are material things we can change—tomorrow—to bring violent crime down.
Perhaps the solution is in public transport. No normal person can afford to pay the congestion charge every day, so, almost without exception, commuters rely on public transport to travel to central London. Why not make public transport free? We don’t pay a 50p toll to use the roads every time we go outside, because we all use them every single day. They’re simply paid for out of general taxation. If we all rely upon public transport every day, why not make it free to ensure that people are never priced out of safety?
There might be something deeper to increased socialisation of property, beyond the immediate benefit. There’s some inextricable link between private property and violence, whether in a country struck by wars for control of land, like the DROC, or a country where you can legally justify killing someone to protect your possessions, such as the USA. If dominance and protectiveness are male traits, then perhaps the reevaluation of private property starts to get at the root cause of male violence.
Perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. But whatever the solution is, it exists, and it can be implemented tomorrow. Most politicians will naturally incline to agree that men should simply stop being violent, because any material change in how our society runs would involve controversial policy and law changes which could impact the economy and the politician’s chance of reelection. If the rumours of Priti Patel’s bid to restore the death penalty are true, she’ll no doubt be all the more likely to try it now, when public sympathy will be at its highest. It’ll go down well with core Tory voters, and with the socially conservative red wall, who have the Tories on probation. As a solution to the problem of male violence, hanging would be far too easy, far too unimaginative, far too predictable.
I’ve watched the news every night since I was 5. Of course, I was too young to understand any of it back then. I didn’t understand, for example, what the significance of the news on the 11th of September 2001 was, why my parents had stopped dead in our farmhouse in Devon, staring apprehensively past me at the TV, what vague premonitions must have gone through their mind about how this bloody sacrifice would fuel and prime the American war machine, or why all of this meant I couldn’t switch over to the Cartoon Network. Nothing but the abduction of the odd British child seemed to interrupt the schedule of news reports on the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the next half decade.
I may have been too young to understand what was happening, but I certainly wasn’t too young to be influenced by what I saw. At the age of 7, I picked up a toy plastic trowel from the garden, which was yellow and conical, and which someone who takes their coffee without milk and their breakfasts with extra bacon may inform me was not in fact a trowel, trowels are flat, soyboy, but which, regardless of its function, looked to young me a bit like a gun. I practised posing with it, holding it out in front of me and pointing its tip at some imaginary enemy. When I was satisfied that I looked the part, I ran into the living room, where some report about the current death count of British soldiers was rolling on TV, held my arm out in front of me like I’d practised, and said to my Father in my mock-soldier voice “the Iraqis will surrender!”
I couldn’t have pointed to Iraq on a map. I only knew that it was somewhere called the Middle East. I didn’t know what the people who lived there had done wrong, or why they should have surrendered. I only knew that we were at war with them, and that it was important that we won the war.
My father’s gaze shifted from the TV to me. He stared for a second, and responded “why?” Of course, this wasn’t the response I expected or wanted. At the time, I only knew that I had done something shameful. I deposited the trowel—or whatever trades tool I had utilised as my prop—in the garden. I’m not sure what I did after that, perhaps I played flash games on my iMac. I only have a couple of memories from this age: my first day of primary school, and my Dad’s question.
I didn’t dwell on the question at the time, but I’ve dwelt on it since. I ask myself this “why” a lot. I ask other people this “why” too, and they don’t always like it. It’s not easy to put a precocious child in his place, especially one who read a chapter of The God Delusion and considered himself an expert on theology, science and reason. But it’s harder still to question one’s beliefs as an adult.
The more I ask myself this “why,” the less easily I can commit myself to any opinion. I used to have no problem holding strong opinions on any and every issue. Perhaps I’m just turning into a centrist Dad. My Lib Dem membership card may already be in the post. But I think it’s important to have certainty and clarity in opinions, and where no clarity is possessed, no opinion should be strong. Where evidence is insufficient, opinions should be measured. Where news articles lack provenance, they shouldn’t be trusted. The rule I live by is to treat everything I read as though it were written in the Daily Mail.
Of course, we have methods to separate truth from fiction. Mashallah, we have science. There are facts, and it is possible to hold strong opinions. But when these methods aren’t applied, opinions are worthless, and make a fool out of the opiner. Where opinions are backed up substantially, they ought to resist a thorough questioning, and good faith questioning ought to be accepted in good sport. Anyway, my port glass has emptied twice since I started writing this. I’ve got a point to make, I think, so I’ll make it now.
I’ve recently made several people unhappy by questioning their beliefs. I hope they’ll accept that I did so strictly in the spirit of asking “why?” As the wonderful Peter Hitchens offered to Owen Jones recently: “always opponents, never enemies.”
We’ve all seen those long, poorly written Facebook posts with shaky grammar, too many ellipses, and arbitrary ALL CAPS. It’s probably didactic and morally absolutist—no doubt self righteous too—and may well mention the death penalty. It’s long and waffling, and not too pleasant on the eyes or on the mind. It’s the literary equivalent of comfort food: all the ingredients of a gourmet word feast are there, but the presentation is not. But invariably appended beneath it is a response saying “WELL SAID!” It’s perfectly possible to respect the sentiment of the drivel without offering it unearned praise. Indeed, this is preferable to handing out participation medals to the prose-deaf. I’d recommend “NICELY CONCEIVED!” which honours the thought, not the execution.
But “well said”s aren’t handed out like lung conditions within 3 miles of the north circular because people are too charitable towards, or uncritical of, heinous writing; rather, I think phrases like these are a linguistic crutch. We all have a library of phrases and figures of speech which we turn to for expedience. This saves us time, since we don’t have to construct so many brand new sentences. However, I think we should be more thoughtful about these expressions we have tucked away for later use. Through overuse, they become thoughtless and lose their original meaning. Take this overused refrain, for example: “that’s fascism at its best”. What exactly does this mean? All the Volkswagens but without the genocide?
There are lots of every day linguistic crutches which are used for no reason other than that they are the first words to come to mind. This might be fine for everyday speech, but each of these overused sentence fillers we use is a black hole which sucks in creativity from the entire paragraph, leaving nothing but an emotionless, skeletal corpse of perfunctory words behind. These villains are phrases like “…revolves around…” “the fact that…” “the reason as to why…” “so as to”. What a dreadful, dreary list! Leave those sorts of phrases to dull letters written by listless desk jockeys.
I implore you to think twice before you use a phrase you’ve used a hundred times before—spoken or written. When a phrase becomes overused, we forget what alternatives we could use. We will continue to use that dull phrase even when it isn’t quite apposite, just because we’re familiar with it. Try starting your sentences with different words, words you’d never have thought to start a sentence with. Try writing differently. You might have to restructure the entire sentence just to avoid using a specific word or phrase, but your writing will be so much more organic, so much more unique, for it.
Angela Smith was wrong to use the term “funny tinge” to describe People of Colour. Not because it’s an offensive term, necessarily—by all accounts she’s a perfectly amiable person without a racist bone in her body. But what she said was simply, laughably, inaccurate. If we assume that the whole population of Europe (741 million) and the USA (327 million) is white, and ignore the negligible populations of South Africa and Australia, that gives just over a billion white people in the world. But the world as a whole has a population of 7.5 billion. So 6 billion people, according to Smith, must have a “funny tinge”. Of course, the majority of people cannot be funny, odd or queer, by definition. Therefore, it makes far more sense to consider Angela and I to have the funny tinge—in my case the tinge of a pink-speckled Milkybar.*
But if the term funny tinge is misapplied to people with dark skin, so too is the term “people of colour”. The phrase seems to have appeared out of nowhere in the last half decade. The earliest online references I can find are no more than ten years old. The phrase seems to be keenly employed by politicians and TV writers in place of any other word or phrase for black and Asian people. Wendell Pierce, who portrays Dutchess Markle’s father in the US procedural drama Suits, suddenly starts referring to himself as a “person of colour” from about the fifth season onwards. Very strange that a black man in his 60s would suddenly start using a new, less specific term for his skin colour, but not strange at all that the young writers of the show wish to keep up with modern trends. And so the phrase has seeped into culture, becoming the correct way to describe someone who is of the worlds 6.5 billion majority.
While the phrase “funny tinge” ascribes minority status to a majority, the phrase “people of colour” is a very vague term for a large number of people with different skin types from different continents, and seems also to imply minority status.
Race exists only insofar as racism exists. No neurologist can tell the difference between a black brain, a white brain or a brown brain. There is no human subspecies. There’s no scientific way to classify races, to define what makes a person white, or slavic, or African or Caribbean. This was the Pursuit of some 19th century scientists who wished to justify European colonialism and supremacy. The Irish** and Africans alike were found to have differently shaped skulls with smaller cranial volumes than white British people. But such findings have been refuted and are no longer credible.
Race, then, really doesn’t exist in any qualitative way. To say that islamophobia isn’t racism because Islam isn’t a race is an indisputable tautology, but so too could it be said that africanism isn’t racism because African isn’t a race.
Race exists insofar as racism exists. Black people are 4.3 times more likely to be stopped and searched in London than white men, but stops of black people are “less likely to detect crime”. In this case the term “black” is functional. It groups people, whether they be English, Nigerian or Jamaican, who share a genetic trait which causes prejudicial behaviour against them. It’s been reported that black people with African names are less likely to be successful in job applications compared to similarly qualified black people without African names. In this case it’s a shared culture which causes prejudice—again, to use the word “black” is functional.
In 2015, National Action member Zack Davies attempted to kill a Muslim with a machete in a Tesco store. The victim, a Sikh dentist, wasn’t a Muslim, but he was asian—as are most Muslims. In this case a shared skin colour—genetic—and having a beard—cultural—made the target the same race as the generic Muslim who had been the intended target. To call this dentist Asian is functional—he wouldn’t have been the victim of attempted murder had he been black or white.
In 2014, Mark Duggan was pursued by police based on intelligence as reliable as “a conversation in a pub.” And so a black man, whose prior convictions amounted to possession of cannabis and stolen goods, was shot dead. Even though the Detective Chief Inspector leading the investigation had “no information on which [he] could have arrested Mark Duggan,” the police insist to this day that he was “one of Europe’s most violent criminals.”
The Sikh dentist and Mark Duggan are both “people of colour.” Yet Sikh men are not as likely to be stopped and searched without reason as black men, and black men are less likely than sikhs to be the victims of Islamophobia. When the phrase “people of colour” is used, all meaning is lost. Race is only important when discussing racism, and so the words used to describe the victims and instigators must be functionally useful. The Sikh dentist wasn’t killed because he was a person of colour, but because he was Asian. Mark Duggan was portrayed in the media and by police as a gang leader—his photos being cropped carefully to illustrate this slander—in a way that a white person summarily killed by police wouldn’t have been.
The Saudi Arabian ruling class abuses cheap labour from Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and other South Asian countries to build its vast skyscrapers, sweep its Audi-worn roads and look after its children. These migrant workers are employed for up to 20 hours per day, are often unprotected by the country’s labour laws, cannot leave the country without their employer’s permission, and work in temperatures that humans simply aren’t designed for in a part of the world which should, by right, be uninhabited. They are at the bottom of society, treated as a lower class than Arabs and white people. Yet the Arab ruling class and the South Asian migrant workers are all people of colour! When we use this term rather than the terms arabs and South Asians, analysis is impossible. The race of those involved is functional.
A Kuala Lumpurian migrant worker has little in common with the Saudi king, it should go without saying. I do suspect the term “people of colour” is limited to the west, used by American politicians and TV writers. Yet even in America the term is impotent. Barack Obama has little in common with a Puerto Rican mechanic. A Puerto Rican mechanic has little in common with a Japanese accountant. All of the above, though they are all minorities in America, facing different forms of racism from different people, if any, are “people of colour”.
The term Pee-puh-luv-cuh-lour is a syllabic and clumsy way of being very imprecise about what you mean to say, and is effectively identical in meaning to the deprecated “coloured person”, a term equally as vague and useless for race analysis, but unused because it’s incorrect (rather than because it’s impotent to explain race inequality).
There are no fixed, defined human races. There are only descriptions: blue eyed, brown skinned, straight-haired, big lipped, long-bearded, Muslim… the list is as long as you like. Combined, some of these qualities determine the way people view us, and we are likely to share similar characteristics with those from the same culture or country as us. These qualities are therefore important, regardless of how inconsequential they may be in determining our capacities for thinking, sports, or violence; they determine our perceived race, and how others treat us.
Angela Smith’s phrase “funny tinge”, even if it weren’t inaccurate for making a minority out of a majority, would be no less useless a term than the phrase “people of colour”. The terms black, Asian, South Asian, Japanese, East Asian, African, Nigerian, Jamaican (the list might as well be as long as the roll call of the United Nations, probably longer) are all meaningful, material terms. When applied to a person, they have explanatory power. “People of colour” never does. So why use it?
*Yeah, 1615 words of whitesplaining. Stick that in your intersectional pipe.
**Anti-African racism needs no citation. But here’s an example of identical anti-Irish racism from Anthony S. Wohl, Professor of History, Vassar College:
“In much of the pseudo-scientific literature of the day the Irish were held to be inferior, an example of a lower evolutionary form, closer to the apes than their “superiors”, the Anglo-Saxons . Cartoons in Punch portrayed the Irish as having bestial, ape-like or demonic features and the Irishman, (especially the political radical) was invariably given a long or prognathous jaw, the stigmata to the phrenologists of a lower evolutionary order, degeneracy, or criminality. Thus John Beddoe, who later became the President of the Anthropological Institute (1889-1891), wrote in his Races of Britain (1862) that all men of genius were orthognathous (less prominent jaw bones) while the Irish and the Welsh were prognathous and that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who, in turn, was linked, according to Beddoe, to the “Africanoid”. The position of the Celt in Beddoe’s “Index of Nigrescence” was very different from that of the Anglo-Saxon. These ideas were not confined to a lunatic fringe of the scientific community, for although they never won over the mainstream of British scientists they were disseminated broadly and it was even hinted that the Irish might be the elusive missing link! Certainly the “ape-like” Celt became something of an malevolent cliche of Victorian racism. Thus Charles Kingsley could write:
‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] … I don’t believe they are our fault … But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much…'”
This racist juxtaposition popped up on my Facebook timeline today. It’s the second of its type I’ve attempted to research and debunk in recent weeks. The creators of these images always say they’re opposed to Islam, not to Arabs and Asians—but it’s always a white man they compare the muslim to, isn’t it? Never Vithu, the computer science student who speaks like Hugh Grant and spent his gap year in Sydney.
I traced the meme, posted last August to a Twitter account, since suspended, called Mark B😉. A Youtuber, Reverend Simon Sideways, used the meme last August as the basis for a rant about how great Britain used to be back when polio killed and the water pipes were made from led. He didn’t attempt to justify the figures. From what I can tell they’ve been pulled out of a dark and hairy place (not the cabinet office). Here are 2017s pensions and benefits allowances. The basic rate is considerably greater than £106.
I can’t quite put my finger on it…
As usual, reverse searching the cropped and separated images proved tricky—more so the old man holding the sign which, upon close inspection of the font and a detailed analysis of the colour gradient of the paper, I decided was photoshopped. The writing is too uniform—both the Ts and the Rs are identical—and the paper seems too perfectly white and too perfectly flat and uncreased. Then I took a step back and realised half the guy’s hand is missing.
I tried breaking down the man’s appearance into its component parts, and feeding these to google: “old man”, “old man blue hat”, “pensioner sad”, “white hair long man hat”, “bad news story old man”. No matches.
He looked like a man whose picture was featured in a newspaper article about how the tree he grew up playing under and had his first kiss under is to be removed by a heartless town council to provide kindling for the mayor’s personal fireplace, and has been instructed by the photographer to wear his glummest face to really tug the readers’ heartstrings.
But found it I did, and I wasn’t too far off.
Indignant British pensioner Dr Roland Graf | Credit: Sunday Mirror
The photo was taken for the Sunday Mirror in Leicester, England in early 2017. Dr Roland Graf, a retired consultant, was instructed by the photographer to wear his glummest face because British Gas was suing him for £197 in unpaid standing charges and unpaid debt recovery costs—despite his having been disconnected from mains gas since the year 2000. For those of you who still think the 90s were about 10 or so years ago and need a little perspective, the year 2000 began 19 years ago this month. British Gas even attempted to obtain a warrant to seize his (unconnected) gas meter by force.
Whoever made this can’t blame Brussels on their bad photosh00p skillz
The muslim woman was quite hard to track down. With no clue as to her ethnicity, trying to find the source of the image with key words was hopeless. “Burqa woman” yielded 5,210,000 results*. I didn’t have quite enough time to check all of those results, and there was no guarantee that she would even appear on any of those pages. Her Burqa is imperative to the context of this blog post, but not, perhaps, to the context of whichever website she was initially posted to. Perhaps she was uploaded to some exasperated Asian’s bus spotting blog, spited and cursed for walking in front of a rare bus as the photo was taken, and given as an example of why one should look where one is going. In this case, the words burqa or niqab wouldn’t even appear on the webpage. Who knows.
Two Indian muslims walking in the rain, Bhopal | Credit: Prakash Hatvalne
But I found the photo, eventually, in the Associated Press archives. Their photos aren’t indexed by google, so reverse image searching didn’t immediately locate the original photo. The photo is of not one, but two Indian women on a rainy day in the town of Bhopal, India in 2002 (not Leicester, you’ll note). They are among the 14% of Indians who are Muslim, but are categorically not immigrants. The photograph was taken by Prakash Hatvalne, a fantastic photo journalist, former chief photographer at the Times of India. I’ve reached out to Mr Hatvalne, but haven’t heard back from him yet. The women don’t appear to be of much significance. The photo was taken at a time when a burqa-ban was being considered in India, and they merely illustrate an example of the sort of clothing which could be banned.
The city of Bhopal, however, is significant for a few reasons: it was the first city in central India to have a pride march; there are 600 caves southeast of the city with Palaeolithic paintings; it has an average elevation of 500m; and it’s summer highs reach 40º. OK, it’s not the most titillating place in the world. In fact, it’s best known for the world’s worst industrial disaster. 3,787 people died in the aftermath of a gas leak at a pesticide plant in the city in 1984, and 3,900 were severely and permanently injured. Many thousands more continue to suffer from illnesses due to exposure to harmful chemicals today. Toxic chemicals such as mercury and carcinogens are present around the site in quantities much higher than expected, and are also found in some mothers’ breast milk. British reporter Jack Laurenson photographed the abandoned facility in 2010. He said “it was very difficult to breathe and at times I felt like I was drowning.”
The American chemical company Union Carbide, which owned the pesticide plant at the time of the incident, was revealed by Wikileaks to have paid the intelligence company Stratfor to spy on activists in Bhopal campaigning for more money to be spent on cleaning the toxic waste. They also maintain that the incident was caused by sabotage, not by negligence or lax safety checks. They abandoned their 99 year lease of the plant, which they were not even half way through, to the Indian government, leaving the toxic mess they caused for someone else to clean up.
As for British gas, having cut off a pensioner’s gas supply 20 years ago and taking him to court for a 200 pound bill for gas he hasn’t had the opportunity to use, they say “We are disappointed he has not accepted the solution we proposed.” White or brown, the powerless are treated with absolute contempt by the most powerful.
So, the man on the left, a retired doctor, has been hounded by a British energy company for 197 pounds in unpaid standing charges on a gas meter which has been disconnected for a fifth of this century. The Muslim women whom his photo was altered to scorn are residents of a city in which thousands of people still suffer from a massive gas leak which an American chemical company still hasn’t cleaned up after 35 years. Who, then, are the traitors?
*It occurred to me that, while searching google for a woman in a niqab using keywords seems impossible given that all of her identifying features are hidden, it’s probably no harder for a computer algorithm than searching for a person with visible features. Our brains have evolved to identify and find patterns in faces, but for a computer, there’s no difference between the folds, creases and shadows of a niqab and the folds, creases and shadows of a face.
This came up on my Facebook feed a couple of days ago.
It follows a common theme, which anyone who regularly uses social media is probably familiar with. Anti-muslim rhetoric accompanied by a picture of a random muslim. This is one of the most abjectly racist I’ve seen. Usually a scary photo of Hook-Hand Hamza, or some other person equally as objectionable for their religious beliefs, is used, which gives the faintest thought of legitimacy to the rhetoric. But this example uses a photo of an unknown, happy looking family. The message is unquestionable: all Muslims are to be feared.
I’ve seen it more than once before in recent years—it’s been shared thousand of times on Facebook—but I couldn’t find any reference to it on Snopes or similar websites. Snopes typically investigates pictures like this which contain falsifiable facts, so it’s not very surprising that they haven’t covered this meme, which doesn’t attempt to justify itself with dodgy statistics. The only occurrences of the meme yielded by a reverse image search are on websites which shared it uncritically, but without any further information on who the family are or where they’re from.
It was surprisingly difficult to find the origin of the family’s photo by reverse image searching a crop of the meme. Although it was a cropped and misshapen copy of the family portrait which I used as my basis for a reverse search, I’m astonished that the original took so long to find. It’s no wonder people get away with uploading whole films and tv shows to YouTube by simply flipping the video on its y axis. I eventually tracked down the origin of the family’s picture through perseverance, a guess at their ethnicity, and with the web searching skills I had initially developed as a young teen to bypass child-friendly internet filters.
It turns out they’re Tatars from Crimea. They were photographed by a freelance reporter for Al Jazeera after they had fled for Borinya, a village in West Ukraine, in 2014. They fled their homes, jobs, houses and belongings in Crimea due to the increasing anti-muslim sentiment in Crimea, which followed its Russian annexation. So it was that they became part of the 473,000 displaced people in Ukraine that year.
Not wanting for the big city buzz and benefits lifestyle in London (or whichever major city you believe is victim to “the muslim invasion”), they asked the charity who helped them to leave Crimea to settle them in a quiet village somewhere in Ukraine. So they moved to Borinya, where the local catholic community gave them accommodation in an school house, and jobs in an orchard. According to the village librarian: “They came here in the spring and they didn’t have any money for food, so we helped them out as best we could. You can’t just have people come here and not help them out.”
I got in touch with the reporter, John Wendle, who hadn’t been aware of the repurposing of his photo. He was shocked to find out about it, but no longer has a contact for the family, so couldn’t tell me if they’ve moved since 2014, or if they’re still in the same village.
The provenance of the miners’ photo was even more mystifying, even after I had determined that they must be British, going by their uniform and, in my girlfriend’s unequivocal words, “well, they’re just British, aren’t they?”. With some of those content filter defying search skills*, I eventually found them. They turned out to be workers at a coal mine in Cwmgrach—needless to say in Wales—which reopened in 2008 after several decades of closure. The BBC reported in August 2013 that half the jobs at the site could be cut (around 100 people) due to investors pulling out. Six weeks later, the mine went into administration, with a “skeleton staff remaining to ensure the safety of the site” as of September 2017, according to the administrators. Based on the 80,000 pounds paid in wages over a two month period and an average wage of 30,000 pounds, about 16 staff remain. A total job loss of 92%. The photo was taken in 2007, when the miners pictured were preparing the mine to be reopened.
The racist meme was created by an Australian Facebook page called Freedom of Speech Productions. The meme was uploaded to their Facebook page in November of last year, although I suspect it had been made earlier and posted on their previous Facebook page, which was shut down in the same month. Either way, the meme was made after November 2017, when the photo of the Tatar family was taken. By this time, the sweeping cuts at the mine in Cwmgrach, where the pictured miners worked, had already been made. They are most probably among those who lost their jobs. And it wasn’t the fault of muslims or migrants; it was the shareholders of their mine who care only about making an extra cent on every dollar who deprived them of their jobs. It certainly wasn’t the fault of a family of Ukranians who live several thousand miles away from Wales.
Of course, the people who made the meme are Australian, and so the miners are, in their mind, representative of good, hardworking, white Australians. Abdullah, a Geography teacher and one of the displaced Tatars who moved to Borinya with the pictured family, could point out these Australians’ warped understanding of the proximity of Borinya to any Australian city. Others among the thousands who shared the meme will consider the miners to be representative of good, hardworking white people in their own country.
Regardless of the family’s location, they are living proof of Islamophobia. Despite the fact that the blame for job losses must always be placed with the extraordinarily wealthy, such as the investors in Wales’s coal mines, who can choose to make thousands of people jobless in a single, swift move, there are people who would rather aportion blame to a Ukranian family who doubtlessly do not have the economic power to effect job losses in Britain. Why? Because the father has a scary beard and the mother wears a scary head scarf.
*Seriously parents, they do not work. My Landlord recently changed internet providers. Under new legislation by the personal liberty loving Tory government, all internet service providers must have their adult content filter turned on by default, to be turned off at the customers’ request. This denies access by default to all sites related to gambling, dating, porn and other vices, and any websites miscategorised as one of the above. I had the choice of delicately and innocently asking my landlord to please unobstruct my right to live a life of vice, or to circumvent totally the restrictions placed on my internet access by the government. The latter alternative took a total 15 minutes of my time, and I ain’t no hacker. I thought internet access blocks might have improved since I was 12. They haven’t. I say again, parents: no matter what the politicians tell you, internet content blocks don’t protect children. They’re just a veil to make tech illiterate people think the internet is rosier than it is.
Some of our possessions have no apparent value. We hold on to these possessions anyway, for a variety of reasons. The reasons might be tied to the past. Perhaps you can’t bring yourself to take those trainers—the ones you haven’t worn since you last moved, dirty and holey—to the charity shop because you wore them throughout your uni life. They’re the last wall standing between you, the fence climbing, neighbour terrorising student you were, and the bill paying, coffee drinking adult you’ve become. Of course, you weren’t really much of a rebel. You got a 2.1 and spent more quiet nights at home than tearing up the town, but the shoes remind you of selective moments. You can’t get rid of that book you haven’t read for five years, even though you need space for more, because you immersed yourself in it while you were with your ex. You won’t read it again, because, in truth, it wasn’t that interesting. But in your mind, you’ve created a false memory of it, a memory where this book is profound and heart wrenching, just as she said it was. To take it to the charity shop would be to admit that you’re memories of the book, and of the relationship, are romanticised. The book isn’t meaningful to you for its own qualities, but because it supports a story about your past that you want to believe.
But the false, idealised memories aren’t strictly the domain of the past, I think. Sometimes we are precious about our useless possessions because we’re attached to a memory which hasn’t yet happened. A memory of an idealised future.
I spent this afternoon rummaging around in my wardrobe, trying to empty it of anything I never wear. One ugly pair of trousers stood out. They’re grey, chequered trouser trousers, the kind that might be worn by my late great uncle, an itinerant, or a barista in Hackney. I’ve worn them about thrice in the year I’ve had them. But what makes them particularly hard to decommission is the unrealised future I imagined when I bought them. Me, grey trousers hooked around my waist, several inches of shin showing below at the bottom, with a loose shirt of a thin material billowing over the waist, serving coffee in a cool part of London, saying ‘no worries’ to people with MacBooks in return for money. I’d probably have fun conversations with my colleague, maybe hit up her WhatsApp. Asking someone out in a getup like this is needless of course, like trying to electrocute yourself with a toaster in a bathtub filled with deionised water (the toaster represents flirting, the purified water represents your hot body made unpalatable by extreme hipster fashion—1984 style fashion, where good is bad and bad is good).
But like idealised memories from the past, idealised dreams can stick rigidly to your mind. That they haven’t happened yet perhaps makes them all the more difficult to let go.
If you have the space for sentimental stuff, that’s fine. But consider letting go of that guitar that’s warped with age, and still hasn’t seen use. Let go of the books you’re never going to read. Let go of the box full of crap on top of your wardrobe. Make room for memories that might happen.
I’ve been in a lovely relationship for 5 months, and I thankfully wasn’t chosen for the severity of my attire. That makes it easier to get rid of my so-ugly-they’re-cool trousers. I still insist though that I’m one day going to learn to count on my Japanese abacus.
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