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...

The Matrix is Broken... The Matrix is Broken...

Recently I watched one of my right on and new age friends rage with unrestrained passion about something that he didn't agree with at an event he was involved in. It made me want to use his own words and assure him that 'everything happens for a reason and perhaps he needs to embrace this set back and look for the positives in it', but I couldn't help think that it would be seen as antagonistic rather than anything else - and to be fair there would have been an element of antagonism in there, but only after a fashion.

The thing is it made me realise that even the most non-judgemental of us are exactly the opposite of what we hold as a solid human trait. Prejudices appear all the time and it isn't just the ignorant or the rich who do this. I recently made friends with a man who seemed extremely decent; his job, wife and lifestyle suggested the last thing he is was an ignorant xenophobe with obvious BNP/EDL leanings - even seemingly intelligent people can exhibit levels of fuckwittedness that beggar belief.

I've met wilfully ignorant people in the last few weeks; people who smoke while pregnant; people who work zero hour contracts and have the urine extracted from them by their employers; people who still believe the NHS will be £350billion a second better off now we're out of the EU, because they haven't taken any notice of a newspaper or a news program since the day after the referendum. I've met a school teacher who voted Leave, who told me she did it because she wanted her country back, that the country was getting to the point where there wasn't enough room and it would be nice to have the majority of kids in her class where English was the first language... A teacher... You have to start wondering about whether humanity has just subconsciously developed an absurdist self-destruct gene?

Having a wife who earns a little too much money has meant that my periods of unemployment in recent years has garnered me the absolute minimum I should be entitled to, yet someone I've known best part of my life and hasn't been remotely interested in getting a job - since 1992 - gets so much support, even now - in the wake of IDS and his purges - that it actually made me feel anger towards him (my friend that is, I've felt anger towards IDS since about 1999). After years of contributing to the economy and paying my NI, I was entitled to essentially fuck all. Had I been 'a feckless workshy wanker' I could have got just about everything I needed - like free prescriptions, bus fares or other frivolous things people with money take for granted. The sad thing is I'm not a particularly nice person but I felt slightly ashamed of myself for feeling angry towards my friend's 'life choice'.

It also should be noted that my friend with the unemployment fixation is also damaged goods and probably now falls into the category of 'people never likely to be able to do a real job again, ever'. Whether he arrived at this situation through nurture or nature isn't for debate (I know the answer to this specific question, though), but one thing is clear 50% of the blame, at least, has to be placed at the feet of the governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s, because they didn't do enough to change attitudes, or invest enough in education (because what sense is there investing in our future?) and it only got worse in the 80s and 90s.

After spending over 15 years working with the disenfranchised and becoming a good socialist as a result, I know the difference between the disenfranchised and those who play the system because they don't want to work or contribute - the people who think it is okay to live off of everyone else without contributing anything other than more actual cost to the taxpayer. Yes, you can argue, it isn't their fault they're in whatever predicament they're in - more the fault of successive governments doing little or nothing for the most isolated and alienated in already poor communities, while simultaneously finding something unrelated to blame - but I'm also not that left wing where I won't call a feckless wanker a feckless wanker.

Take the argument that migrant workers put too much strain on our services. The blame for this appeared to be placed firmly at the feet of the EU despite the fact that 62% of our migrants come from outside of the EU and never once, during the EU debate, did any party - Corbyn's included - point out that the strains on hospitals, schools and public services was actually the fault of the government for not investing in expanding it all when the need grew. I mean it doesn't take an idiot to realise that even if they hooked private business into the building of these things, they would all have been patronised, would have employed more people and would have injected money back into the economy. That isn't socialism, that's common sense that could have been exploited however the Tories wanted and still been beneficial to the majority of people.

I have suggested before that I'm beginning to think that politicians are mainly all idiots, or have finally decided that we're all idiots, because all politics seems to be choreographed now; even Corbyn really appears to be quite toothless because no one - apart from the lovely Mairhi Black (who is 21) - seems to asking the pertinent questions or making any salient points. Take the decision to overrule the No Fracking decision by Lancashire Council - whatever way you feel about fracking, when you consider the overall costs compared to, say, putting up an offshore wind farm, you have to wonder if our politicians are also brainless psychopaths too. Am I the only person who questions his (or her) own sanity at comments, actions or interviews given by politicians. I mean, is Priti Patel even real?

I recently spent a few hours talking to the owner of a small private hire company and he told me some astounding facts about taxis. 54% of all taxis booked are by girls/women aged between 14 and 40. But even more incredible is that upwards of 60% of all taxis are booked/hailed by people on benefits. As someone who has, at times, viewed £10 as an important third of my shopping bill, to be in a position where walking or catching a bus doesn't even feature in someone's thinking, despite having nothing makes me begin to wonder if the Tories are right and that some people exploit the system. Or perhaps kids in poor schools need more education as to how to prioritise their money better when they leave education and go straight into a career on welfare. Ironically, we've allowed TV, the media and commercialism/advertising to brainwash the young into thinking that having an iPhone is more important than eating healthily and we've seen, throughout the last few decades, common sense levels in most individuals drop to the point where (almost) statistically more than half of the people here are twats. We've all been persuaded to spend all of the money we haven't got on cheap shit that won't last while simultaneously blaming Johnny Foreigner for stealing someone else's job...

The unswerving power of commercialism has placed many of our citizens in a position where they view essentials as trivial and trivia as essential and urban ghettos and isolated areas of deprivation are as a result of no government ever addressing - in my life time, at least - the problems in any long-term way. Mix commercialism with a bit of prejudice and you create a dependent with the belief of entitlement. That's the fault of governments since the 1960s who didn't acknowledge prevention was better, and cost less, than cure. Governments never really see or understand the problem until it is too late to fix. And then you need to acknowledge that to fix just some of society's ills - the ones who wield power fancy supporting - it would cost far more money than is available and we all know money is an exclusive privilege of the rich.

***

Over the last few days we've seen the right-leaning media ratchet up the hate and racism against migrants, or in fact anyone not from the UK. I fail to see what the ultimate aim is, unless Murdock, Beaverbrook and the rest actually want the UK to become a xenophobic, isolated island with no trade deals and vilified by the rest of the world.

What good are these 'rags' doing? What possible positive outcomes can we hope to get when facts are ignored in favour of jingoistic hate and bile? With at least 52% of the country's voters prone to believe sensationalist bullshit and lies you have to start wondering if there's a crazy agenda being set out by the media. Because it has to be crazy - Jeremy Corbyn is a fair politician but is treated and talked about like he was a former Nazi death camp guard, while the Tories and their supporters get nastier and the only places these are covered are in blogs, news sites (not affiliated to money) and Twitter - thus having little or no credence to the 52% because it wasn't seen on the BBC or read in the Sun or Daily Mail.

We're in the depths of a self-fulfilling prophecy; I'm not sure what the prophecy is, just that it appears to involve hate and ultimately violence.