Xenophobia

The natives are getting restless. The word is on the street, there are hints in the papers and Facebook is buzzing with it. They’re banning England shirts in pubs! They’re banning England shirts in a World cup year!
Well actually they’re not but it seems a lot of people think they are. This all appears to stem from a Sun story where the police had advised pubs in Croydon not to allow football shirt wearing fans in during the World cup. This is mainly because of the carnage of 2006 when it seems Croydon turned into a football related bloodbath.
This localised story has gone viral and, not helped by the Sun’s headline of ‘England shirts banned!’, seems to have evolved into ‘England shirts banned because they offend foreigners, you can’t do anything anymore, it’s political correctness gone mad!’.
That didn’t take long did it?
The natives have grabbed this with both hands. Last night I was taken home by my ‘racist’ cabby, to be fair he’s probably not but he always seems to get onto the subject and picks and chooses his words very carefully. The last time he picked me up we had a ten minute debate in which he tried to convince me I was English. He seemed completely shocked that I didn’t consider myself as such.
‘But you were born here.’
‘Yeah, but it’s a cultural thing. Being British and being English isn’t inter-changeable. You wouldn’t expect a Welshman to say he was English but he would probably concede he was British.’
I could almost hear the cogs of his brain turning as he tried to digest this. His main gripe was that his national pride was being taken away from him and he felt marginalised in his own country.
‘But you were born here!’
Right.
I’ve never been a flag waver of any description but this has seemed to be a bit of a running theme of late. Part of me hankers for the time when people were happy for me to be foreign and be done with it. Now every one wants to adopt me because a) I’m white and b) my English is impeccable. The Girlf her self struggles with it. She tells me I’m not really Greek.
For these two reasons a lot of people seem to be under the impression I’d be happy to convert. My personal favourite quote is ‘you lot are alright, it’s the Paki’s we hate’. Clearly I’m ment to be charmed and feel excepted by this sentiment but I digress.
Cabby’s main issue seems to be that immigrants get an easier ride than the indigenous population, the laws are all geared to keep them happy and he can go fuck himself. The working Englishman has had his pride taken away from him and he can’t say anything anymore without appearing racist. My personal opinion is that is dependent on what you want to say. If what you want to say is ignorant or racist you will come across as such. Surely in a reasonable debate you won’t if you back your argument up properly.
Last night he brought up the England shirt/flag issue. It would appear the police tried to ban St George’s flags on the seafront but faced with blank refusal they backed down. So apparently, it would seem, flags haven’t been banned but this didn’t stop cabby getting wound up by it. It is just another example of his national identity being taken away, or not as it transpires.
I’m putting a flag up in the shop. It’s my shop and it’s the World cup, I’ve been doing it for years. No ones ever said anything and I suspect no one will because all this talk of banning shirts and flags is bullshit. People enjoy winding themselves up and it’s just another excuse to have a go at foreigners. It’s the ‘if they come over here they should adopt our ways’ mentality.
The irony is that’s exactly what most immigrants have been doing for years and while the general population tears it’s self to pieces over it’s national identity and it’s self imposed thought crimes the rest of us, the immigrants, the foreigners get on with our lives with a sense of bemusement.
People in this country have lost their identity and their pride and this is because all the things that made Britain great, all the wealth and power and prestige came from the rape and pillage and subjugation of three quarters of the planet. Queen Victoria wasn’t a queen she was an Empress.
Britain’s never would be slaves because everyone else fucking was.
So in three generations cabby’s gone from a world ruler, a member of an elite by default, by an accident of birth, to just another bloke. He can’t even call a Paki a Paki anymore because he’ll get into trouble and will look racist when he’s being racist.
Facebook is awash with this under current of xenophobia and groups are cropping up daily.

‘If we can’t wear England shirts, they can’t wear turbans!’

‘It’s our country, if you don't like it fuck off!’

Obviously I’ve corrected all the spelling and grammatical errors (no really, I’m not being funny. It’s true. It seems national pride goes hand in hand with an inability to express yourself correctly in written English).
People are scared of the differences, different cultures and different clothes. These people stand out therefore seem more prevalent than they actually are. This fear of strangeness is very pronounced in certain areas. The BNP has capitalised extensively in these places. Stirring up antagonism and generally making stuff up to fuel existing prejudices. BNP support is either racist or ignorant. It’s one or the other; you’re either racist or stupid.
The BNP is a racist party because all their policies come down to race. They target the poor and ignorant because they’re the ones most likely to live in diverse areas with social problems. The immigrants are taking their benefits. People with decent jobs aren’t going to be effected by an influx of people unable to speak the language. People on the state tit will perceive that they are because there are only so many houses and only so much money to go around. Throw a couple of burka’s into the equation and extremist parties can make hay.
Everyone should be allowed to express pride in their culture but they have to know what they’re proud of. You have to back up the statement with examples otherwise its just jingoistic nonsense. I have no problem with cabby being proud of being English but the subtext is he doesn’t know why he’s proud. He is looking forward to the World cup because it gives people a sense of national pride even though he ISN’T a football person. The poor bastard seems to be clutching at straws.
I’m proud of being Greek Cypriot. The Girlf says I’m arrogant and racist about it and really I’m English because I was born here. I’m not actually proud of being Greek but I am proud of the hard working, upper working class, lower middle class enclave of Cypriot-ness in which I’ve been raised. We’re a small immigrant community now in our third generation. We’re anglicised to an extent but we still retain a slightly old fashioned Cypriot culture which is dying out in Cyprus. As a culture we have evolved away from home so we are different from actual Cypriots and even though we’ve grown up over here we’ve held on to the old culture enough to be different from the indigenous population.
So for me national identity and national pride are abstract terms. My jingoistic pride concerns a population of a few hundred people. So I can be involved as much or as little as I choose with everyone else. I guess I’m lucky like that so if anyone wants to call me a Paki it doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s just one more person to walk past and ignore if they were on fire.

The best laid plans...

The Girlf is stressed. After a successful week of dieting her weight loss has ground to a halt. Six pounds and six days into it she is listless and irritable, she moans about her headaches and mopes around the house grumbling.
I compliment her on how good she’s looking but she just scowls at me.
‘This is all your fault!’ she growls.
With the wedding now less than a year away she is intent on slimming down. The fear of being considered a plus size bride has gripped her and her massive chocolate addiction is being tackled head on. The one who has to pay for her cold turkey is me. With no chocolate to stabilise her mood she’s taken to sitting and quietly rocking. Eyes fixed on nothing, she quietly mumbles incoherently to her self.
All my tender interjections of comfort are met with the death glare. I don’t understand and I don’t care it seems so no matter how much I cajole or pamper my sweet honeyed words fall on deaf ears, her mind is distant and fixated on the idea of Dairy milk.
To compound my pain simultaneously she has decided to give up Diet Coke. Her Diet Coke addiction has been the elephant in the room of our relationship. Maybe not so much an elephant in the room, more a pile of empty Diet Coke cans of equal size and mass to an elephant in the lounge. Clearing her empties away everyday would keep a couple of Polish women gainfully employed.
I would go as far as to say that I’ve actually noticed a marked improvement in the tone and shape of my ass since I moved in three months ago. I put this down to spending twenty minutes a day running up and down the stairs my arms full of half empty tinnies.
Subsequently she isn’t her usually happy bubbly self at the moment what with being constantly caffeine deprived and on a permanent sugar crash. She looks good for it though. No pain, no gain I suppose.
It’s becoming very apparent that I need a car. I am stuck in the middle of nowhere. Getting into town has become a military operation. There is no just strolling in anymore. My day has to be meticulously planned so everything I need to do at home is done before I ring a cab. Only then can I venture to do any other chores that involve human contact.
I now plan a trip to the bank days in advance. Once I’m in town I’m in town, there is no popping home anymore so a day when I go in early before work is a one stop shop. I have to clear my copy book in one fell swoop.
Yesterday was such a day. My beard had started to take over my face and my hair was several different lengths making me look exceptionally bald. I couldn’t put off a trip to the barbers any longer and I needed to get to the bank to top up the wedding fund. I never made it last week and subsequently spent too much of my wages. Clearly I needed to rectify that this week and pay in the difference. This week’s austerity juxtaposing last week’s frivolity.
So I entered the barbers near enough penniless and in a fit of unexplainable generosity which I can’t fathom I allowed a woman to cut my hair. I rarely allow a girl to get her hands on my head. My life has been a winding procession of women fucking up my hair. From childhood the prejudice has been justified over and over again and yesterday didn’t sway my conviction one little bit.
In all fairness my hair looks fine. It’s exactly what I asked for and she has made an excellent job of making me not look bald. Unfortunately she has decimated my beard.
My request was simple, a number one over the beard. That’s all a wanted, that’s exactly what I ment. Take the clippers, attach the number one setting and run it over my beard. I simple enough request you would think. For some reason she took it upon her self to give me a tidy up and before a realised what was going on she was shaving one corner of my neck into a neat curve.
I am totally at ease with my hairy neck; in fact I like my hairy neck. What I don’t like is the neat, gay looking beard cut she’s given me. Of course once she’d done the one side I was totally committed to having the other side done. I quietly simmered as she gave me a clearly defined border between skin and hair, smiling she turned my face into pre nineties Berlin. I will have to see a man about it when it grows out a bit next week.
Beards aren’t ment to be tidy and sculptured. I beard by definition is near enough an effortless procedure. You don’t choose to have one; you choose NOT to have one. Messing around with it defeats its purpose. You end up looking poncey and gay. All paedophiles have goatees, have you noticed that?
So now the shore line of my facial hair has been artificially pushed inland by several inches and for some reason it’s made me look like I’ve got a double chin. I’ve gone from caveman to medallion man in one sitting.

I swear on my cross I will never allow a woman to cut my hair again. This is an abomination to far.

More politics

Well, that all happened a lot quicker than I thought it would happen. I thought we were in for days of negotiation but no, it seems that the government conceded without any kind of a fight. If the Liberals are to be believed it sounds like they didn’t even try to form a working relationship.
A lot of sour grapes I think. After thirteen years of unchecked power it seems that the Labour party doesn’t want to share. They would rather throw their toys out of the pram and skulk off to sulk on the opposition benches.
Perhaps after three terms with such overwhelming majorities the thought of forming a minority government with the Liberals and having to pander to the Scots and the Welsh to pass anything through the house is a humiliation to far. No clear majority and too many concessions. They give up a lot and gain very little. Maybe the best idea is to let someone else sort all their messes out while they lick their wounds and plot the next election.
The left are going nuts. The casual observer would think the bloody Nazis had got into power so loud are the cries of anguish. Dave Cameron is being painted as the Anti-Christ, the resurrection of Margret Thatcher who ruined our lives and damaged the country so much we elected her three times.
A cynic would surmise they are all scared about losing their state hand-outs and are worried about their cushy public sector jobs and ridiculously high pensions. Surely not, surely they have all our best interests in mind?
The irony is any ‘Nasty Tory’ legislation will be tempered in this coalition. What we have, it would seem, is a grown up compromise, an abandonment of party politics for the good of the country. Right now we don’t need three minority parties in parliament bickering and not doing very much.
However you can’t tell Labour voters that. Anyone who doesn’t vote Labour, they would have you believe, is either stupid or a selfish bastard or both. Their arrogance has been palpable as they argue their right to rule even though they comprehensively lost the bloody election. All too quickly they co-opted the Liberal Democrats and highlighted their similarities so vehemently you would believe they were actually a splinter group of the Labour party instead of a completely separate political entity.
Well it hasn’t worked out for them. Their party didn’t want to work with the Liberals for whatever reason, probably a case of simple mathematics or perhaps maybe out of pure honour seeing as they lost the election.
Much as they loath it David Cameron is now our Prime minister despite his heinous crime of being a bit posh. This is still a hanging offence in this country, a reverse snobbery that limits the working class. I don’t care if Dave-o was born into a bit of money. How does this stop him running the country? Diane Abbot, who I actually like, is on the left of the Labour party, black and working class but none of these things stop her sending her kids to private school. Where Diane has her kids educated is up to Diane. By the same token if Dave went to a nice school good for Dave. He’s Prime minister, clearly it was worth every penny.
But Dave’s posh and Dave’s a Tory and apparently Dave didn’t stand close enough to his wife when he delivered his first speech so therefore he’s a cunt. With some people he’ll never win even though, it was reported, he cooked Sam Cam breakfast on the day of the election. To them he’ll still be nasty Tory Dave.
Of course the real winners in all of this are the Liberals. For the first time in a century they’ve got a bit of power and for all the talk about them selling out their support, how else could they have achieved this? They wouldn’t have. They’d win a seat here, a seat there, but never get into office.
Now they can push through their demands. Foremost this would be electoral reform. A change in the way we elect our representatives so that there are fewer wasted votes and a bigger proportion of views are represented in parliament. There seems to be talk of an AV system being put to a public referendum. This is how Wikipedia describes AV.

Under AV+, most candidates are elected from single-member constituencies under the Alternative Vote (AV), also known as the instant-runoff voting system. An additional 15–20% of candidates are elected under the regional party lists. Like the Additional Member System (AMS), AV+ list seats are allocated to offset the disproportionality created by the single-member constituencies. Unlike AMS, with 20% or fewer of legislators elected from party lists, AV+ would not achieve full proportionality, but would correct some of the disparity caused by single-member-district elections. List candidates are elected on open lists, meaning voters have a role in choosing which particular candidates on the party lists are elected. This helps address criticism that AV+ would create two classes of legislators: one with individual mandates and one without.


Get that? You still have a local MP but when you go to the poll you will be given the chance to vote for a second or third choice (or forth, or fifth depending on the system). If there is no clear winner with over 50% of the vote you go to the second, third, forth choice until you get one.
The MP’s on the regional lists will be elected depending on their parties’ percentage of the vote in a given region. So the higher the percentage, the further down the list you go, the more MP’s you get.
This way you get a local representative who is answerable to you and your party of choice will benefit from your vote if they don’t get elected in that particular constituency. What you end up with is the best of two systems, it’s more representative without getting into the messy carnage of proportional representation and you still have a personal contact with the executive.
This will be put to us in a referendum and we can make the choice to change.
All in all we are in very different, very exiting times. The political landscape is changing; it is indeed a new day.

Dave asked us to vote for change and now, like it or not, we have it. Everything is different now. Little did we know this is what we were going to end up with but it could be beautiful.

Politics

It’s been a long weekend hasn’t it? We went to the polls on Thursday and here we are entering Tuesday and still we have no government. What we do have are several options all of which seem to point to another general election within a year.
The first being a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats but this may be ideologically stalled from the start. There would be more common ground found between the Liberals and the Labour party but this new Lib-Lab pact wouldn’t have a working majority in the commons and thus wouldn’t establish a strong workable government.
The final option would be a minority Conservative government but this would have the same problems as a Lib-Lab coalition and would be dependent on the other two parties not seeing eye to eye when it tried to push through policy. It would, however, be very susceptible to an undermining block vote of the other two parties should they wish to gang up and hinder it whether that be for ideological or political reasons.
All of a sudden the Liberals have become the strongest players in British politics. They have become the debutants at the ball, making their rounds trying to establish the best match for their ambitions. To put it more coarsely Nick Clegg has spent the weekend wiggling his arse at the two main parties in an attempt to gauge who’s willing to pay more for the pleasure.
Inadvertently Clegg has given us a glimpse at what a proportional representative electoral system would look like. Make no mistake the Liberals have done very badly in this election. Although, in the run up, they came across as the sexy underdogs and although Nick Clegg himself got a boost in the televised debates, they actually lost seats. Despite all the talk of them deposing Labour as the second party they did worse than five years ago under Charles Kennedy, who was probably pissed through most of the election.
Now, five seats down from last week, they hold the keys to number ten. Whoever can charm them the most will establish the next government. This is how proportional representation works. The smaller parties, the parties that never had a prayer of winning the election will dictate its outcome. Some people would have you believe this is democratic.
Others claim this stalemate is the result of a ‘Progressive majority’, a unified and deliberate attempt by centre left voters to keep the Conservatives out of office. As if they conspired to wilfully lose the election and force a ‘Rainbow coalition’ of the left.
So we’re in a rather surreal situation where it’s very possible that Labour and the Liberals will join forces then tout for support from everyone else in the commons, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Nationalists and that Green party MP, bless her. We would have a multi-coloured coalition and the Conservatives, the party that won the most seats, the party that won the most new seats, the biggest single party in the house would be the opposition.
I fail to see how this would be democratic. Labour lost the election. They lost ninety one seats. Ninety one Labour MP’s lost their jobs. If you imagine a general election as nationwide vote of confidence on a government how else can you read the results as anything other than a massive Labour failure?
Labour polled twenty nine percent of the vote. Michael Foot achieved twenty eight percent in 1983 and has been universally blamed for putting Labour on the opposition benches for the following fourteen years. The difference between that election and this one is in that one the Conservatives got a majority.
The Conservatives gained ninety seven seats and with the final seat being voted on next month they will probably end up with ninety eight gains. Three hundred and seven seats, nineteen seats off the magic majority but although they are the biggest party, although they made all but one of the gains in this election, Plaid Cymru raised their tally from two to three; this does not entitle them to form a government. Even though over ten million people voted for Dave Cameron to be the next Prime minister there is nothing in our constitution to say this has to be the way.
If the Labour party and the Liberal party get their act together the two losing parties will form the next government and even though the country overwhelming voted to send Gordon Brown back to Scotland he will remain our Prime minster until September when the Labour party will poll its members on who they want to head the government.
Am I missing something?
These parties combined only achieved eight seats more than the Conservatives. Two separate players in the election couldn’t get a double figure lead on the largest party. I don’t buy this ‘Progressive majority’ theory. This is no deliberate move by the voting left. This is a quirk of the figures. Where’s the mandate?
All I see is self serving self interest in this. Labour is desperate to hold on to power. Last time they lost power they were out for eighteen years. Losing this one is unthinkable; in 1997 they inherited the strongest economy of any incoming government now the economy is in tatters, there is a real danger of the country going bankrupt. Should they leave office now what would be the chances of the electorate forgiving them anytime soon? As much as they claim that this sorry mess is the result of global factors out of their control they were all to eager to take credit for the bounty of riches that the John Major’s government left them. You can’t have it both ways.
By the same token the Liberal Democrats, for the first time in their history, have sniff of rigging the electoral system in their favour. They, up until now, have been the third party in what is essentially a two party system. Before this election they were bit players, a fringe group of weirdo’s who only ended up on the front pages when there was a rent boy scandal or they throw out their leader for his alcoholism (its worth noting that Charles Kennedy’s problems were overlooked while he was winning them seats and gaining them support and he was only pushed when he started to become a liability). Now they are the unpopular kid who’s turned up at the party with all the cocaine. Everyone one wants to be their friend.
This is their chance to push for electoral reform, their chance to push for a proportional electoral system that would give them more seats at the ballot box. This would be great for Liberal Democrats but pretty shit for everyone else. A proportional system would give us the same problem of the last few days every single election. No party with a working majority and backroom wrangling for days before any government could be established.
Israel uses proportional representation; they have to have an election every couple of years because the governments are so unstable and all the deciding votes are held by fringe religious extremists, which explains why Israel always seems to be in the shit. PR hasn’t fared to well historically. It was backroom compromises that saw Hitler becoming the German chancellor in 1933. He was elected to the roll as part of a coalition.
PR may be fairer but you end up with compromised, unstable governments and you let the nutters in. Under PR we will end up with BNP MP’s.
It is understandable that neither of the two main parties have been in any great hurry to change the voting system. Up until now it has suited them. It’s given them strong, stable power and a mandate to rule and implement their own ideologies.
It’s telling that yesterday Gordon Brown offered the Liberals electoral reform as part of a coalition deal. This offer is an admittance that he knows the party’s over. Before the election neither Brown nor Cameron would have dignified the idea by even mentioning it. All of sudden it has becoming the olive branch that could keep Labour in office. The fact that Brown would offer it is a sign of desperation. The present system elected three strong Labour governments, why give all that up?
Perhaps it’s the fear of another eighteen years in the wilderness; perhaps it’s the fear of being remembered as one of the worse Prime ministers in a century. Perhaps it’s pure narcissism that despite losing the election spectacularly he feels they still have the right to run the country.
In the next few days some kind of deal will be thrashed out between someone or another and our new government will be revealed to us. What that government looks like, at the moment, is anybody’s guess. Democratically and I believe morally the Conservatives should be at the centre of that government. They won the most votes, they won the most seats. They have the mandate to at least give it a shot even if it means going back to the polls later this year. Offering the Liberals a referendum on electoral reform is a nice move. Just because you have a referendum doesn’t mean you have acknowledge its results. Referendums are not binding they are merely a gauge of public opinion.
It seems that a lot of Liberal MP’s will be holding their noses if they are required to work with a Tory administration. One would wonder what would be worse. Working with the Tories or propping up a defunct and rejected Labour government that has failed on all its promises, a Labour government that has dragged us into illegal wars, a Labour government that has totally decimated our civil liberties over the last thirteen years. All things considered the Conservatives might be worth a go.