A Racially-Motivated Message

I was in Ayr earlier this year. Ayr's like Scotland's Bournemouth and was, without doubt, the most cosmopolitan place I've been to since I've lived in Scotland. While I was sitting in the sunshine, outside Poundland, I saw a group of young women - schoolgirls on holiday - all wearing hijabs. It was the first proper Muslims I'd seen in over a year. No one up here seems bothered by it and the fact all the girls sounded Scottish, you wouldn't have known any difference if you'd had your eyes closed.

Interestingly, about twenty minutes earlier, when we were wondering up to Primark, we saw two nuns - not your usual soberly dressed women, looking like nurses with headgear, but two full-on penguins. More extravagant and with just as little flesh on display. Yes, they're women of God. The girls in hijabs were probably devout followers of Allah. We have preconceptions of Muslims. Boris Johnson displayed that in August with a column about not allowing Muslims to wear what they want to wear.

I'd never defend Johnson. The man is a conniving and devious politician and disguises his ambition with buffoonery. However, reading his column you had to acknowledge that his 'offensive' remarks have probably been made worse by the solitary fact he wrote them. There was elements of casual racism, but largely he was trying to make a jokey point about a sensitive issue.

He failed. But... did he really? He's become more of a champion to the new far-right than he was before that column (and his slagging off of his former boss) and, at the time, we had people uttering the words 'freedom of speech' and so they should, because it is only right. Like it is only right that any speech can be challenged, in a constructive way, using the same freedom of speech rules. Racists and bigots need to be challenged, rather than banning them. That just inflames and makes a mockery of the 'freedom of speech' ideal.

What Johnson has probably achieved is help drive the wedge between xenophobic/racist Brits and normal people deeper. I mean, when you read about Pakistani rape gangs in Yorkshire and ISIS terrorists and radicalised British wannabe martyrs, how can those who will never be happy until all non-British people are gone ever be appeased? How are Muslims ever going to feel accepted when in some places they must have begun to feel like Negroes in 1950s USA? For every newspaper or twat US President claiming we have Muslim enclaves in our cities, we have genuinely scared people avoiding the streets for fear of reprisals because of their culture.

Now we discover that the UK has an incredible racial bias that extends to pretty much anyone who isn't white, heterosexual and, above all, English. Brexit has allowed English people to believe they're on the verge of a new Empire, one that finally kicks Johnny Foreigner squarely in the testes. History suggests when you start to alienate certain groups of people it isn't long before your cohorts are alienating others. We live in a 'Kingdom' that demonises pretty much anyone who isn't British and employed; but as The Guardian newspaper has found, even if you are British and employed, it depends on how 'British' you are.

A percentage of Brits are of Asian, African or West Indian origins. In fact, a number are also of European heritage, but are not as well accepted because they have a foreign - too foreign - sounding name. Farage is okay, but Davidovich or Simkiewicz isn't.

Let's be clear about something; I had a Chinese landlord once who thought Indians were 'dirty bastards'. I knew a man from Pakistan who thought Arabs (Iranians specifically) were allowing the world to destroy itself because they want to rule everything. I've met a man from England who believes in Brexit so hard that any dissenting voice is a liar and I've seen evidence (whether real or Russian bot) on social media platforms of such vile callousness towards people 'not like us' that it's added a new dimension to the "I'm all right, Jack" mentality. An attitude I'd always attached to dyed-in-the-wool Tory voters who believed that homelessness was a left wing conspiracy and that anyone on welfare/benefits was a scrounger or out to make something from the state. The human race is inherently xenophobic - I'd call them racist, but it's simply a fear and loathing of something that you can't relate to.

Michael Gove (or Pob as we like to think of him) pretty much declared there would be violence and national unrest if his Brexit doesn't happen and while that is just the Hard Brexit supporters' own Project Fear, in this world of intolerance he's probably not a hundred miles from the truth. But hey, in the USA BAME citizens feel like their rights and position has been eroded more in the last 2 years than it has since Rosa Parks told a white boy to find his own seat on the bus.

I look at BAME Tory politicians and wonder how long before they start to feel like a token gesture to tempt the delusional blacks and Asians to continue voting for them - 'You're all right, it's those black and Asian kids the Nazigraph is talking about' will be a variation of the excuse given to them.

Living in this part of Scotland you see a lot of casual racism, which you oddly don't see when someone is getting a takeaway from the Chinese or Indian restaurants, and, to be fair, I've not heard any overt nastiness from anyone up here towards anyone culturally different, but that's not to say it doesn't exist. There are enough Scottish Tories with bizarre ideas about a lot of things and there's considerably more Brextremists who've moved up from England, despite the fact that Scotland voted by a big margin to stay in the EU (and has been largely ignored by England since). These are the kind of people who'll always look for someone else to blame and once the country no longer has any Europeans to blame, they'll pick on the black, brown and yellow foreigners, while beginning to cast an eye of suspicion at Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders - because, you know, they might look and sound like us but they've probably stolen jobs, hospital beds and the last place on the twice weekly bus service which was hacked and slashed by the Tory controlled council and nothing to do with a 'foreign' tax payer and contributor...

What we need to realise is white people can't possibly understand what it's like to be black or Asian; the same as they can't really understand what it's like vice versa. Heterosexual people might think they can relate to homosexuals, but we can't really understand what is going on inside their 'souls' even if we can put our minds into that space. I'd like to think rational people - the kind of people who would rather help than hurt - really struggle to understand how a fellow human being can be purposefully vile and nasty to someone less fortunate (and equally, I can almost understand how 30-year-old neo-fascists can believe the Holocaust was just some Jewish propaganda and couldn't have possibly really happened... that is until the first people start being shipped into camps, like Muslims in parts of China).

The thing is it's pretty much the difference between someone with left politics and someone with right.

History is there to be learnt from and if we can't learn from it then we don't really have any right to be here. Without humans there would still be many similar traits in the animals; war, love, compassion, hatred, fear ... that's because, we're still just animals too. Devious, nasty and cruel ones, but we still shit, like having sex and beating the fuck out of people who are weaker or not like us. Not everyone is and many people who vote Tory, or feel their have little or no prejudices, probably aren't. The thing is it's easier to hate than it is to embrace and hold and until a large percentage - the majority of the population of the world - understand and practice this, just about everyone is screwed.

What part of the Bible or the Quran which tells us to 'love our neighbour' also tells us to kill them if they don't agree 100% with us? Because, that's all I've really got. I don't have a solution (apart from the war I've been forecasting for the last three years). When 50% of the planet suffers from different degrees of cognitive dissonance, you ain't got a hope of living in a peaceful non-prejudice world; so you turn your back and let the worst parts of human nature run rampant among the people supposedly running the world. And because you know you're just one person, you know you can't do much about it and if you think like that it's already too late...

Still, mustn't grumble, eh?

2016

Wow. Just wow.

It's been surreal. So much death, despair and other bad stuff beginning with the letter D and probably ending in Destruction.

The thing is... I knew in my heart of hearts that Leave would win. The reason I knew this (but clearly refused to acknowledge it as anything other than an irrational fear) was because, where I live, Northampton has always appeared to be a multi-cultural place with a lot of progressive thinking people and all I heard until June 23 was ignorance, racism and jingoism. I said recently that I'd met 1 person in 10 who was going to vote Remain, but the reality is it was closer to 1-30 and something was telling me to listen to this and that there was nothing I could do about it.

I'd been convinced Trump didn't stand a chance, but in the last few months that confidence was waning as it became clear that this man appealed to people who didn't vote, like Leave appealed to apathetic Brits. Clinton didn't have the ability to mobilise her supporters the way Trump organised his 'movement' and history was writ large by people, who experts believe are going to be the demographic least likely to benefit from this man's presidency.

Sounds all too familiar.

Yet, while I sit and gawp at my social media feeds full of horror, disbelief and insults, I can't feel that surprised by the US presidential election result. I just wish I'd had £100 on Trump this time last year.

While my social media is full of shock and awe I'm seeing one thing clearly - rational thinkers are in decline. What my social media has been devoid of has been anything remotely positive - a bit like Brexit but with added apocalypse warnings.

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who feels this way, but if I'm not we're all being deliberately quiet - a Third View is probably unwelcome in the polarised world of hate and reason, but almost from the point where I realised that Donald Trump had won I started to think: there's nothing we can do, so all we can do is resurrect hope.

I don't really feel all that hopeful, but what's the alternative? To sit and perpetuate disdain and negativity, much like I accuse the right wing of doing? Perhaps Brexit and Trump are the best things to happen to the Western World in decades; perhaps they'll shake up the neo-liberalism reality of haves and many have nots. I can't help thinking it is an unlikely scenario, yet oddly I think Trump will have a less traumatic effect on the Americans than Brexit will on the UK. I actually think little will change in the USA because Presidents don't really wield that much power when you think about it. Yes, they might be the most powerful people in the world but that's only figuratively; repeated presidents have failed to achieve their greatest ambitions because of the complicated structure of US government. In reality, Obama was a dead duck president from the moment he started talking about radical reforms and helping minorities, because the Republican-led House and Senate stymied his every move and so many deals had to be cut to get even the least radical ideas through.

Trump was elected as a Republican, but there's a lot of republicans out there who can't stand him; are either far left or right of whatever his actual politics are and then there's the Democrats, reduced to fighting over scraps but maybe in interesting bargaining positions. Trump will probably not heal the divides within the GOP, but if poor people don't see things happening and their senators and politicians are constantly opposing the man they voted for then the power of the people might manifest in curious ways. Personally, I think Trump is a mixture of canny and barking mad - all the best psychopaths are - I'm not convinced he'll be as right wing as people believe and I think he might represent a new breed of 'politician' - the Nationalist social democrat.

The idea of rampant Nationalism mixed with a slightly twisted version of socialism isn't that much of anathema, in many ways people don't link politics and racism in the same way. We've seen xenophobia and suspicion of foreigners in much greater numbers in urban places, in ageing ghettos and in the idyllic countryside. Incidents of racism in areas with more migrants tends to be higher, but you could say if you had a block of flats full to the brim with burglars will there be more burglaries? Many of these places would never consider voting Tory, yet wouldn't piss on a smouldering Bulgarian. Racism and politics are not exclusive and racism isn't just a right wing thing.

The sad thing about some of the comments I've seen over the last six months from Leave voters who would never call themselves racist are those who genuinely believe they aren't intolerant yet then say the country is full, or the foreigners are stretching our infrastructure to the limit, because it's easy to do that than look at the cause of why it is like that. I said in the last blog that humans simply don't like each other very much and that is reflected by the extra dislike we tend to show for people not like us. Amelioration obviously isn't working and humanity is a long way away from living peacefully and harmoniously together; if people can hate each other over something as simple as a leylandii then religion, avarice, and colour is a shoo-in.

What Trump and Brexit has done has shown, in possibly a slightly stupid, ill-educated way, that politicians have stopped being audible to almost 50% of the population of the world. People no longer vote because, to quote the most famous quote - it only encourages them. Or, it doesn't matter who you vote for the government gets in. People no longer see politicians working in their interests and this is compounded periodically by scandal, expenses, corruption or downright nastiness. Heck, even if you have the smallest of skeletons in your cupboard and talk only about fairness and peace you're just as likely, if not more, to be pilloried by the establishment and its lackeys.

What a world?

Me and many like me have had secret dreams of a world political takeover where fairness and equality replaces the current regime and there have been moments, albeit fleeting, where this seemed almost possible. It now seems that democracy is a bit broken in its current form and instead of the left exploiting it, the right have managed to reinvent themselves and steal it. It is a little like turkeys voting for Christmas and the millions who voted hoping for a significant change in their lives will, when they have finished blaming everyone else, will start looking at the people and politicians they were expecting to make a change - for the good - in their lives and demanding answers.

The problem is, unless the political system is examined, scrutinised and a fairer alternative put in place; one that makes people believe their vote is worth casting, less and less will actually vote and more and more 'mandates' will be based on ridiculously small percentages of the actual voting population. The reality of the UK is that only about 27% of the actual physical population voted for Brexit. In the USA the turnout was not much higher than 50% of which Trump actually got less votes than Clinton, so his potentially momentous term of office is a mandate from about 24% of all Americans. Politicians - at present - like low turnouts because they have a better chance of winning.

There's also one other thing that politicians need to do; they need to be more accessible rather than just plain slimy and creepy. They shouldn't have to be whiter than white but they should have the interests of the people at heart and be spared lobbyists, bribes and ways to corrupt the system for their own benefits. Politicians should only have one job and should, while they are in elected office, forsake any outside interests while allowing them to be open to scrutiny by an independent body to ensure they are working as MPs and not on securing the futures of just their families and friends. There should be fixed terms for MPs and the idea of becoming a career politician should be outlawed.

Extremism doesn't just exist on the right. I have formed some very extremist views in the last six months, one of which is unbelievably undemocratic and yet I'd argue for why I think it would be a good thing. I don't believe we should allow old people the vote and I do believe we should allow anyone over the age of 14 to be allowed to vote. The reason is simple and callous - old people don't particularly vote for what is the nation's interest; the key issues for very elderly voters is what's in it for them and there's a good chance many will die during a 5-year government. 14-17 year olds will spend as little as 20% but as much as 99% of their young lives being unable to have a say in a country that will have a say over them. If you turn 18 a week after an election, you'll be 23 by the time you get the chance to vote and you'll have no say in how those five years will affect you, politically. One vote might not mean much but a couple of million would.

I accept that we're not going to see a political Logan's Run scenario, but I would like to see the voting age dramatically reduced and more proactive education in schools about politics, how it affects everyone and what to expect if the world doesn't end up being lovely and fluffy with 6 bedroom mansions and a model wife/husband. Because at the moment we're creating a politically ignorant underclass of society that isn't emotionally mature enough to understand their significance.