Over the weekend, over 300 people marched through my home town of Sutton-in-Ashfield in a protest against… well that is not quite clear. Immigration? Sexual assault of a minor? A hotel that might/might not be taking in asylum seekers? A loss of white male identity?
What we do know is that it all started with this post from the local MP, Lee Anderson.
There is so much about this post that is misinformation, intended to fuel a particular narrative. It worked.
There is a real question of whether Anderson broke the law in revealing this information – if indeed it is true. Truth Against Hate (an organisation that seeks to work against racist amd hate) puts it this way;
…the individual in question has been charged, which means the case is now active under UK law. That means public statements which risk prejudicing the trial could be in breach of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
Anderson also links the case to immigration and asylum policy, which some legal experts say could inflame tensions or risk stirring up hostility. We are not accusing anyone of a crime, this post simply asks whether his actions are appropriate or lawful.
If you believe this should be looked into, you can report it to your local police or via the national service:
This story has not been picked up (as far as I can see) by national news outlets – apart from a story in the Mail and the Express who have chosen to focus on the fact that a woman wearing a union jack dress was denied entry to a Wetherspoons pub in the middle of the town as police were trying to reduce tensions and alcohol intake. Of course, the right-wing red tops chose to depict this in a rather different kind of way.
As I watched the march unfolding via facebook, and messages from Michaela’s relatives who still live there, one thing that seemed obvious is that most of the people on the march – apart from a few drunk thugs – thought they were doing a good thing. They have been fed so many lies and half truths by Anderson and countless news and social medial outlets – often funded by shady ultra right wing sources – that they feel themselves to be the good guys in the face of some kind of liberal conspiracy. One sign being waved on the march read ‘Not far right, just concerned’.
The idea that the ‘hoards’ of young men ‘flooding’ into the country via the small boats constitute an existential threat to our country, particularly to our young women, has been pushed relentlessly via outlets such as GB news. This exchange is rather instructive;
The thing is, this is not new.
A certain kind of politics has ALWAYS sought to portray ‘the other’ as ‘the problem’. We know this of course, but yet it works anyway. The question I find myself asking is WHY does it work? How are we so easily taken in?
The answer is partly to do with fear. Firstly the fear of the black and brown outsider, secondly the great fear of those who already feel left behind and excluded of someone else replacing them, getting hold of those things that are scarce and almost out of reach. Housing, the NHS, benefits, jobs, education- exactly the themes that much of the narrative on GB news cycles through over and over again. They know that if people who feel already disadvantaged are presented with information that others are getting what they can not have for free, this will create a reaction – whether or not it is true.
I will not link to any of the news articles or videos, but you do not have to look hard to find articles and social media videos with titles like ‘Immigration is obliterating our communities’. It is all the same fear mongering, targetted at people who already feel excluded and worried about their futures. It is like spraying petrol at a hundred candles. Most commentators feel that this will inevitably lead to violence.
There is more though – for this to be believable, Anderson, Farage and their chums on GB news need ‘experts’ who can back up their outrageous claims with ‘research’ and apparently informed opinion. Much of this is filtered through so called ‘think tanks’ of the Tupton street variety.
The point of this piece though was to connect this post with the one I wrote yesterday. Ther report in The Guardian revealing the work to understand the links to racism and slavery at Edinburgh University.
Today, another article concerned itself with information released about the use by the far right of long ago discredited pseudo-science such as Phrenology and Eugenics.
The advent of modern genetics and human population data has shattered the idea that there are biologically distinct groups, or that humans that can be neatly categorised based on skin colour or external appearance. Genetic variation between populations is continuous and does not align with social, historical and cultural constructs of race. Race, as a genetic concept, does not exist.
Yet, says Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, “people don’t stop believing falsehoods just because the evidence suggests they are wrong”. As IQ testing became the metric of choice for those seeking to draw conclusions about racial differences – often based on biased or fraudulent datasets – old, discredited arguments resurfaced.
In other words, the ways our Empire ancestors justified conquest and colonisation are still being used to justify the ‘othering’ and dehumanising of black and brown people – this time to gain political advantage.
With the recent rise in ethnic nationalism and the far right globally, a resurgence of interest is under way into theories of racial exceptionalism. Last year, the Guardian revealed that an international network of “race science” activists, backed by secret funding from a US tech entrepreneur, had been seeking to influence public debate. Discredited ideas on race, genetics and IQ have become staple topics of far-right online discourse.
“The ideas have absolutely not changed at all,” says Prof Rebecca Sear, an anthropologist at Brunel University of London and president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association. “If you can provide a measurement – IQ, skull size – that helps give racism a respectable gloss.”
I had a conversation with a dear friend recently about how we might approach information or facts on some of this material. I suggested to her that the word ‘hermaneutic’ is important. (There is more about the word here.)
We look at everything through a set of goggles – most of the time ones we don’t even know what we are wearing. This means that how we read things is distorted in ways that we are often only partially aware of.
It also means that information that we (and others) give out – including this blog – is shaped by the hermaneutic of the person or organisation that provided it. In this case, it then becomes important to try to understand this as a means of understanding what is being sold. Facts are dangerous things, easy to use in ways demanded by a particular hermaneutic. If we can understand the nature of that hermaneutic, then perhaps this might enable some compensational caution when these facts become too convenient for a partucular narrative- particularly when this create victims out of victims and suits the ends of people who already have too much power.
this fragile tent 