The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

This was first posted on Facebook on 16th March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

I listened to the Second Reading debate on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill on Monday evening and tonight, and I noted that four points were consistently being made by the obedient Tory MPs:

• Gypsy, Roma, and Irish Travellers are bad and dirty and we need legislation to take action against their habit of just parking on common ground and acting as if they had a right to be there, sometimes even when they own the land their vehicle is parked on, it’s got to be stopped.
• Statues/memorials must be protected
• Long sentences mean we’re doing more against crime
• Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear

The first element of this is the most shocking, of course: basic racism barely even masked. Please remember that any fascist government needs an internal enemy convenient for blame. Brexit will hit farmers and farming economies hard. The Bill grants the police powers to arrest, imprison, and confiscate the mobile home of someone who is, as determined by the police, parked in “illegal encampment” or engaged in anti-social behaviour, also as determined by the police. To be able to distract economically-devastated countryside communities with news that an internal enemy has been arrested, tried, fined, imprisoned, lost their home, may be very useful this year. Certainly the government thinks so, from the consistency of this message from Tory MPs standing up to declare, if anyone doubted, that they were going to vote for the bill.

A week makes

EU Referendum Results Map

A week ago, the exit polls made it look like the UK electorate had instigated the worst political crisis in the UK outside wartime.

By Friday, the counted votes had removed all doubt.

By a majority of less than 4% across the UK, the electorate had voted to leave the EU.

There are a lot of unpleasant realities to digest with that vote.

The worst and most immediate reality: the racists who voted to Leave, because they thought they had got a promise that by voting Leave the government would make the foreigners go, now believe they’ve won. They believe, according to reports speeding in from all over the UK, that they’re now empowered to tell anyone who looks foreign, whether or not they are, to “go home”. The British word for racism is immigrant.

I saw Lauren report this on her Facebook timeline on Friday morning:

In Edinburgh, Lauren Stonebanks, 36, was on a bus on Monday when she says a woman shouted: “‘Get your passport, you’re fucking going home.’” She believes she was targeted because she is mixed race. “As I got off the bus, the woman started making threatening gestures, like punching gestures. It made me feel absolutely terrified.”

Many of the racists who voted to Leave have real problems, often, and real causes for anger. They’ve been told they can blame their problems on the EU and the freedom all EU citizens have to travel across the EU. The problems are real: lack of work, sanctions on benefits, housing shortages, strain on NHS and other public services. None of them are caused by immigration: immigrants are a net benefit to the UK even considered only in financial terms. The official government Vote Remain campaign could hardly say bluntly “Your problems are not caused by EU regulation or immigrants, they’re caused by our austerity policies, our lawless sanctioning of your benefits, our refusal to build new homes, our cuts and creeping privatisation of the NHS. Vote for the EU: their funding is keeping you alive.”

For the love of reading

No baby is born homophobic. Or racist. Or sexist. Or with any other kind of bigotry. Babies can recognise their parents surprisingly young (that is, the people who day-to-day provide them with moment-by-moment care: sadly for Crdnl O’Brien, there’s no evidence babies understand the “natural law” of the Catholic Church which says they ought to recognise only genetic parents who are married to each other).

Parents who want to teach their child sexism will find the surrounding culture holds a host of helpful examples, from Lego kits for girls and other “pink or blue” choices onwards – outrageously offensive or so niggling and normalised that you don’t even feel able to protest.

Parents who want to teach their child racism … usually do. Some parents get more help than others, as this honest personal testimony describes – but a host of influences make a baby born without a racist thought in his or her head turn into someone who thinks that “Asian sex gangs” are the big problem for child exploitation in the UK.

Parents who want to teach their child homophobia and transphobia have a bigger problem. Most homophobic or transphobic parents make the comfortable assumption that their child “just will” acquire their prejudices. This is true in most cases, but parents who also regard the existance of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, as inappropriate to mention to children, will often find to their horror that their child already knows one or more of “those people” long before their parents think they’re ready to be taught homophobic/transphobic bigotry.

Racism not found at UK Border Agency

Really. I searched for it and everything.

O RLY?

The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders (MEA), created in 1993, is granted annually to someone who has demonstrated an exceptional record of combating human rights violations by courageous and innovative means. That’s directly from their website, here. The recipient is chosen by a jury of human rights organisations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Federation of Human Rights, World Organisation Against Torture, Front Line, International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights First, International Service for Human Rights, Diakonie Germany, HURIDOCS.

This year the award goes to Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesra. On 13th October 2011, Nabagesra will stand in the Victoria Hall of Geneva and become the 21st winner of the international human rights award, nominated by a jury of the whole movement.

Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera is the founder and executive director of FARUG, a leading LGBT rights organisation. In January this year her friend and colleague David Kato was murdered. A national newspaper has published pictures of people alleged to be homosexual under the headline HANG THEM. The Parliament of her country has made repeated efforts to pass an Act that would condemn people to death for their sexual orientation. An Anglican bishop has been sent into virtual exile because he argued against this “sexual apartheid“. Nabagesera lives in Uganda, and was moving from house to house to avoid being arrested or killed when, in May this year, she was announced as the winner of this award.

Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty International’s Africa Program Director, said the award recognised “her immense courage as an outspoken voice for human rights amidst a climate of hatred and despicable violence towards lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in Uganda.”

Nabagesera is journeying towards Switzerland now. She is visiting other countries on her way to receive the award, being recognised and celebrated as a hero of equality activism and LGBT human rights. She was invited to be the guest of honour at a Pride celebration in Northern Ireland: Foyle Pride on 24th August.

She won’t be allowed to enter. The UK Border Agency has denied her a visa. They say this is because they have “concerns over her financial status at home in Uganda”. Their spokesperson says the onus is on Nabagesera to demonstrate that she can have a visa, perhaps including “evidence of financial ties to [her] home country” to indicate that she intends to return to Uganda after visiting the UK.

Sha Gillespie, chairperson of Foyle Pride, says: “As a city still evolving and dealing with the legacy of the past, Kasha’s message and story is of particular importance and relevance and inspirational for our wider community to hear. Foyle Pride has invested heavily in bringing Kasha to Derry despite having a very limited budget and relying on donations and the support of local businesses, money and resources that will now be lost. I can’t understand why the UK is the only country to deny her entry and deny the opportunity for the people of Derry and Northern Ireland as a whole the chance to hear this inspirational woman speak.”

What kind of a country turns away a hero of the human rights movement, due to receive a prestigious award in Switzerland in a matter of weeks, a hero who is having an expenses-paid trip to the UK in order to speak at a public event?

Twelve years ago, the British Ambassador to Jamaica, traveling with his wife and two children, was stopped at check-in by British Airways staff. The check-in staff “demanded to see a letter from his employer or other proof of his reasons for travelling to Jamaica.” Robert Reid pointed out to her – he and his family had diplomatic passports and were traveling Club class – that his employer was the British government, and he asked to use the desk phone to contact the Foreign Office. The BA check-in staff told the ambassador to use a public callbox: fortunately, his sister had come to see them off and she – unusually in 1999 – had a mobile phone he could use to call the FO to have them confirm to the airline that yes, DIPLOMAT on a passport has a specific meaning. How could BA staff have been so stupidly rude to a British Ambassador traveling out to his placement with his family?

British Airways response was very British: “Both myself and the check-in agent involved are appalled that a simple mistake by a member of staff, who was following stringent immigration procedures, has been reported as an alleged incident of racism.”

Goodness me. Just because check-in staff looked at a black man and the colour of his skin made them unable to read the word DIPLOMAT on his passport, how could anyone be so gauche as to accuse them of racism?

As Martin Jacques noted four years ago: “The fact that hardly anyone is ever prepared to admit to racist behaviour is perhaps a sort of strength: it speaks to the fact that racism is socially inadmissible. But it is also testimony to profound weakness, a measure of how little distance we have travelled as a society when it comes to understanding racism. For if the truth be told, we are a society that is dripping in racism.”

According to the UKBA’s outline of who can enter the UK as a general visitor, Nabagesra should have been readily awarded a visa. Her expenses are being paid by the non-profit entity which invited her: she has a work in Uganda she has literally dedicated her life to: and in any case, she is due in Geneva in less than two months to receive her award. How could the UK Border Agency decide that she couldn’t be allowed to attend Foyle Pride as the guest of honour?

Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesra, Oslo 2010

Yeah. Dripping with it.

Please sign the petition here. If you are British, you can write to Theresa May, who is Home Secretary and, ironically enough, also Minister for Women and Equality, as: Home Secretary 2 Marsham Street London SW1P 4DF or use public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk or call 020 7035 4848. Check out this post at A Dragon’s Best Friend for good advice on how to write in order to get a constructive answer.