Graceless Islamophobia : Bashing the Archbishop

The nearest thing the British political blogosphere gets to a 'national treasure' is probably Archbishop Cranmer. Purveying a now quaint brand of Tory Anglicanism, a blog whose strapline is "examining politico-religious agendas with politico-religious objectives" doesn't immediately strike one as a recipe for success. However, Cranmer has a wide, and influential following. The denizens of Twitter play along with his habit of referring to himself in the third person as 'his grace', a nod in the direction of the dead theocrat whose name he has borrowed. Hold on, by the way, to the fact that Cranmer 2.0 is perhaps the only significant advocate in English politics for a tradition emphasising the identity of the State as religious, specifically Protestant -  a tradition whose bloody origins and historic advocacy of State-enforced religious uniformity cannot be entirely buried by any amount of tweeness. This awkward truth is not insignificant when assessing his grace's criticism of other religio-political traditions.

Anyway, I digress. Cranmer has an exalted fan club. His blog comes with a long list of approbations from MPs, bishops, and others (including a baffling imprimatur from the late Christian Socialist Movement). Not all of the reviews are entirely positive, it has to be said. Damien Thompson is quoted by the spectral archbishop as calling him "the ghastly Cranmer". Still, insults are signs of impact (nobody takes time out of their editorial schedule to ridicule the West Worthing Jigsaw Club) and there can be little doubt that Cranmer has impact.

This, to name the elephant in the room by jumping up and down very loudly shouting 'look, there's a bloody elephant', not withstanding the fact that his views on a whole range of topics are extremely nasty. Take his offering on Sayeeda Warsi and Sharia finance here.

Entitled "Baronness Warsi's Sharia priorities", the piece commences with a picture of Warsi in a hijab. I leave the semiotics of this to more qualified readers for analysis ("Beware, Here Be Muslamic things" is my best guess), he begins by noting Warsi's words after the meeting of a new Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion and Belief:

Freedom of religion or belief is a personal priority for me. Across the world, people are being singled out and hounded out simply for the faith they follow or the beliefs they hold. The persecution of people because of their faith or belief has, I believe, become a global crisis. I want to make sure we have the best advice available. This is why we have set up this new Advisory Group, made up of real experts in the field, and of those who are working every day in practical ways to defend the right to freedom of religion or belief. I look forward to working with them as we seek to move towards a world where no-one is persecuted for what they believe.

The following day Warsi chaired a meeting of the Global Islamic Finance and Investment Group, a body concerned with the growth of sharia-compliant financial products which, if nothing else, is testimony to capitalism's thoroughly cosmopolitan potential. There are all sorts of interesting economic and financial questions around Islamic finance, but these do no detain Cranmer. She tweeted a lot about the meeting, which does seem to have upset him a little bit; it was certainly sufficient to bring out a sneering disdain for the Islamic, 'thank Allah that we're "Discussing how world finance centres can work together more closely to develop global #Islamicfinance market"'.

But the somewhat ironic irritation by a premier league blogger at the use of social media is only the hors d'oeuvre of outrage. Cranmer changes gear sharply,

His Grace can't help feeling that if Baroness Warsi exuded as much fervour and zeal about the persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East as she manages to conjure for sharia finance, HM Government might just begin to identify ways of alleviating the suffering, trauma and bloodshed that is occurring, as the Baroness observed last year, "on a biblical scale". It is utterly unacceptable that the only statement issued following the meeting of the Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion or Belief was "Thought provoking". What are they going to do? When are they going to do it? How will foreign policy be geared toward the objective? 

Do not misunderstand my intention; the persecution of anyone (Christian or otherwise) by anyone else (Muslim or otherwise) is something that deserves attention, although that attention would be better focused if it were informed by an analysis of sectarianism which went beneath the surface of religiously-motivated persecution. The idea that religions just can't get along, or that one religion in particular is prone to oppress non-adherents, for all its shallowness serves a useful function in deflecting attention from the fragmenting effects on Middle Eastern societies of both military imperialism and struggles over oil wealth. That, however, is a left-wing commonplace. More interesting is the structure of Cranmer's rhetoric here. He has been talking about one issue involving some Muslim people, a discussion of Islamic finance, and has seamlessly shifted to another, the at once tragic and deeply complex reality of religious persecution. Baronness Warsi serves as a kind of middle term, simply by having jobs that require her to address both topics, but the deafeningly silent link is Islam. Cranmer echoes a standard line of Islamophobic thought: how come we are so accommodating to Muslims, when they are killing our brothers and sisters over there? What mugs we are.

An essentialised Islam faces down an equally essentialised Christianity. In this, and in many other ways, the Islamophobic Christian Right exactly mirrors the thought world of the most fundamentalist variants of Islamic thought. There need to be, for this particular bit of ideology to get a hold on our minds, such things as Muslim countries and Christian countries: in some sense every Muslim then needs to share in the guilt of countries coded as Muslim (there is an asymmetry here, of course, since Cranmer and his co-religionists are free to distance themselves from Western governments, and any suggestion that they share any kind of culpability for Fred Phelps or the Shankhill Butchers would be angrily dismissed. The situation regarding Muslims and such non-State agents as al Qaeda is, one imagines, less straightforward). This being so, the psychological stage is set for outrage on cue: why should they get mortgages when Christian coverts are in prison in Pakistan? This is only a question that makes sense within a certain ideological space, undermine that and it is as incomprehensible as asking why I am allowed to eat cake when there are cars parked on double yellow lines in Dalston.

For the slow-learner, the Christian-Muslim opposition is rendered explicit in the final paragraph:

And so the Baroness's Twitter feed becomes a metaphor for her real priorities: the pursuit of religious liberty is worth a photo-tweet and is "thought provoking"; sharia finance is worth a photo-tweet and a stream of tweets, with identifiable plans, opportunities, determination, tipping points, communications and a prime-ministerial speech. This, apparently, is #thoughtleadership, and in that Foreign-Office realm of faith, the suffering God is subject to Mohammed's Mammon.  

There you have it: this Muslim woman is crushing Jesus under the heel of the grasping Prophet. How dare she? The parallels with historic anti-Semitic discourse, by the way are fascinating: an opposition between Christian decency and the venal, worldly, Other, coming to a head at the Crucifixion.

 The use of the persecution of Christians as a lever for Islamophobia is by no means confined to the Cranmer blog. Consider the case of everyone's favourite retired right-wing Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali. It shouldn't need saying that it uses those victims as political fodder in a way that insults rather than expresses solidarity. It shouldn't need saying that it undermines efforts to do anything genuine to help these victims, not least by preventing a proper understanding of the causes of their plight. And it shouldn't need saying that it is the cassocked and surpliced outworking of the controlling ideology of the War on Terror. But, such are the times we live in, I felt the need to say those things anyway.

 His Grace sings Evensong

Friday Video Corner

Wanna buy a labour movement? Millions of careful owners.

It is no doubt a symptom of the onset of middle age that I am worrying about the state of the Labour left, and it particularly its failure to attract the young. I have been aided and abetted in this worry by Mark Fisher's Exiting the  Vampire Castle. If you've not read it, you should - here.

He is, I think, unfair to the Twitter ultra-left. If he has the people in mind I suppose him to have in mind, many of them are prodigiously talented, thoughtful, and have been involved in some impressive feats of organisation. Nonetheless his diagnosis of a (big) layer of the young left, termed by Fisher 'neo-anarchists', is spot on:

They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon. Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. By the time the neo-anarchists had come to political consciousness – and many of them have come to political consciousness remarkably recently, given the level of bullish swagger they sometimes display – the Labour Party had become a Blairite shell, implementing neo-liberalism with a small dose of social justice on the side. But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. There’s a strange implicit rule here: it’s OK to protest against what parliament has done, but it’s not alright to enter into parliament or the mass media to attempt to engineer change from there. Mainstream media is to be disdained, but BBC Question Time is to be watched and moaned about on Twitter. Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.

All of which is true, but which poses more urgently the question - framed by Fisher in Leninist terms calculated to enrage his subjects - 'what is to be done?' His own suggest is the rejection of identitarianism* and the revival of class politics. And bravo for that, but as advice goes it floats at a blisteringly high level of abstraction. Ironically, given his (correct) criticism of moralism on the left, Fisher's more concrete advice seems to be aimed at those he is discussing - change your behaviour and your attitudes.

So let me rephrase the question. Not "what is to be done?", but rather "what are we to do?". If the likes of me are correct, and class politics has to be the starting point for challenging capitalism and its concomitant oppressions, and if I am further correct that the state of play in Britain is such that class politics can't be effective whilst short-cutting the existing labour movement and its institutions, an indelicate question arises. Given the past couple of decades of defeat, uselessness, and morose resignation, how exactly do we make the case to those eager to change the world that the British labour movement is the place to do it?

I don't have a particularly good answer. But I think that this is the right question.



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*Which doesn't mean - or shouldn't mean - the rejection of politics based around particular non-class oppressions. If you want a good example of someone doing intersectionality in a way that doesn't undermine class politics (indeed strengthens it by the draw-dropping observation that some working class people are women, see Rhian Jones' Clampdown.)

Dear as houses

Pete Firmin has a good piece on housing in the latest Labour Briefing. One paragraph in particular hits home about a very live issue in London,

Even when housing is built by local authorities (still a scarcity) or planning permission granted for housing associations or private builders, it is more expensive than it need be. There is much debate around terms like "affordable housing/ rents" and "social rents". The irony is that "affordable" means around 80% of market prices. So even when local authorities insist that developers include "affordable" housing in their schemes - something that happens less and less often - it is far from affordable. Much housing being built in London is built specifically with foreign investors in mind, some being advertised in Singapore before London!

On that last point, the trend towards properties functioning as global speculative investments rather than anything as crudely passe as homes has been helped along by London's own mayor.

That there is a housing crisis in Britain, and especially in London, is widely recognised. As Pete points out though, there is a high level of general political uselessness in proposing solutions. This is an area on which the Left needs to focus attention. Developing joined-up thinking on housing will require analysis, requiring an understanding of how land prices, the low potential for efficiency gains in the housing industry, a culture of home ownership (in turn tied up increasingly with the demonisation of socially housed people), government support for house purchases, and the global exposure of the British housing market give rise to a situation where, on the one hand, ordinary people cannot afford to live in urban centres and, on the other, the effect of the bubble-prone housing market is disastrous, with much of the much-trumpeted current growth being the fictitious creature of housing demand.

This analysis, and policy arising out of it, is a job of work. But, with an eye cast towards this year's local elections and next year's general election, if you want two popular and effective policies that are a vast improvement on the present bi-partisan alliance with property developers and the 'regeneration' agenda, here's two: rent control and council housing building. Now, come on Ed, you've been asked to think boldly.

Friday Video Corner

In honour of Kate Bush's return to the stage:

A beautiful day....

...to bury the news that Boris Johnson has decided to spend £200,000 on three second hand water cannon. From Germany.

On the topic of German water cannon, they did this to a man in Stuttgart:

But still your disquiet. They will only be used in cases of 'extreme disorder'. And we can, of course, trust our friends at the Metropolitan police to identify that. After all, you will recall how guarded they were in their use of force against student fees protests a couple of years back.

Pounds and Euros, circles and dodecagons. What does pop say?

Budget Day, a pre-emptive slow hand clap

Well. it's budget day. Expect austerity. More of it. Expect the projection of heavily gendered moralising into the economic sphere by much agonising about 'working families' to the exclusion of lone parents. Expect to have to pay more for a pint or a packet of fags. And expect the Labour front bench to be just a tiny bit better than the Tories in a way that is more disappointing than reassuring.

What would social democratic reforms of a sort that make a difference and throw open debate look like? A favourite of mine is the land value tax. As a replacement for the Council Tax, it would put more money into the vast majority of peoples' pockets and, via its effect on land prices, put downward pressure on housing prices. Which can't be bad.

Also, increase benefits, tax the rich, and so forth.

 Edited to add (14:29): So I was wrong about the beer. But I find myself in pleasing agreement with Stella Creasy:

So people who can afford to save will do well, as those struggling to make ends meet will pay for it … #smartspenders #twonations #budget14
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) March 19, 2014

Nine million adults, by the way, have no savings. And, given that growth is predicted to fall in 2017/8, one might on tediously orthodox economic grounds wonder about the wisdom of massively incentivising savings in the manner that Gideon has done. Unless, of course, that wisdom is exercised in the cause of the already rich, with scant regard for anyone else. Perish the thought.

Inheritance tax waived for emergency workers killed in the line of duty? Populist nonsense. What, after all, is the rationale of not including others killed at work? It is tragic when a paramedic is killed (not that paramedics tend to leave vast amounts of wealth, but anyway). Is it less tragic when a train driver gets killed in a crash or a shop worker in a robbery? And what does this have to do with unearned wealth anyway? I note, by the way, that those killed by the police, a considerably bigger number than police officers killed in the line of duty, remain susceptible to inheritance tax. Not that the poor black people disproportionately represented in this group have much to leave.

The real question, of course, is how much of this crap Miliband and Balls plan to reverse.

Happy St Patrick's Day!

"The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour."

James Connolly

On what racism isn't

This from this thing of beauty

Who said this?

Racist jokes can be an important element in the development and maintenance of a cohesive, non-racist society.

Was it perhaps an unusually articulate piece of self-justification from Jim Davidson? Or an offering from Philip Blond or one of his henchmen?

Nope, it was a prominent left-wing blogger.

But he has an argument, here you go:

The concept of utani, a Kiswahili word of Arabic origin meaning something like ‘joking relationship’, encompasses  the complex social system of mutual inter-dependency between ethnic groups, who may pre-colonially have had warring a warring relationship around land and livestock, or who may have come into first contact via newly established trade route to the coast.  Utani was, in effect, a swiftly developed social structure that enabled different ethnic groups to cope with the massive changes brought upon them by the first wave of exploitative, international capitalism.

I take his word for it. But here's the basic problem, what he is describing are not racist jokes. They may be jokes about race. No doubt these can have the kind of socially galvanising effect Paul describes. On other occasions they might be rude, thoughtless, offensive, or whatever. None of this is racism. Racism is a structural relationship of power, which finds expression and is in turn reinforced by racist jokes (and many other things). A joke about race is racist just when a member of a dominant group tells it about a member of an oppressed group in the context of systematic group inequality. Which, let's face it, is exactly what we are talking about in Britain. In as much as namby, pamby, politically correct killjoys complain about racist jokes, which we do, it is because we do not want white people telling derogatory jokes about black people.

It is disgraceful to see somebody on the Left muddying waters that should be very clear. Because, in an odd way, Paul is right. Communities can be brought together by racist jokes. The problem is that it is the job of socialists to destroy those kind of communities and replace them with something better.

Dare to be a Daniel : a note on Benn and religion

A striking aspect of Tony Benn that has escaped much attention (outside the religious press at least) in the past 24 hours is his debt to religious, specifically Christian, ideas and images. This is entirely unsurprising in the present climate, where admission of an interest in, let enough attachment to, religion is, in many left-wing circles, the social equivalent of coming out as the unique possessor of a paraphilia involving Jeremy Clarkson and yoghurt.

It is worth pausing to think about Benn's roots in Christianity. His own attachment to the creed was ambiguous, the son of a congregationalist minister and himself a confirmed Anglican, he described himself as a 'student of the teaching of Jesus'. Again and again throughout his speeches and writings, the incompatibility of this or that social injustice with (Benn's interpretation of) that teaching is asserted. Much more often, biblical images are deployed: a recurrent idea for Benn is that the Old Testament presents us with an opposition between 'the kings', who want order and hierarchy, and 'the prophets', who demand justice. We, says Tony, should be on the side of the prophets. Elsewhere, he describes the name of the right-wing Tory pressure group No Turning Back as "the motto of the Gerasene swine". Famously, he takes as a motto, and names a memoir after a Sunday school chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known.

He once delivered the Tawney lecture to (what was in happier days known as) the Christian Socialist Movement on Christianity and socialism, but Benn was no systematic theologian or original Christian socialist thinker. In fact, he often seemed not to get theological or ecclesial distinctions. He would describe devout Anglo-Catholic Eric Heffer as standing in "the tradition of nonconformist dissent". And whilst his parliamentary and other interventions on the ordination of women in the CofE are powerful testaments to a commitment to equality, he doesn't really ever give the impression of understanding what was at issue.

But none of this really matters. What is interesting about Benn is his acknowledgement of, and use of, a religious tradition. Drawing in an eclectic fashion on Christian tropes, and displaying an openness to working with religious groups and individuals, Benn's approach to religion is different from those common on the Left. Many, in recent years, have displayed an enthusiasm for the dimwitted philistinism of the new atheists. Others, including the ancestor of the present blog, have attempted more systematic engagements with religion. In contrast to both, Benn's approach echoes that advocated by Marxist biblical critic Roland Boer. In his Rescuing the Bible, Boer champions a `worldly left', comprised of secular and religious leftists alike, that recognises the importance of the biblical text and promotes emancipatory interpretations. It seems to me that this worldly left has just lost its most significant proponent.

Tony Benn - Mourn and Organise

That the author of this blog is cut up at the departure from this life of a notorious tea drinker is a measure of what we have lost.

I still have in my possession a letter from Tony Benn written to me when I was seventeen years old. I had written him a rather pompous missive about, amongst other things, nuclear weapons, the European Union, and the monarchy. He replied by hand assuring me that he agreed with me "100%" (this was underlined) about nuclear weapons, and enclosing the text of one of his speeches on Europe. A few years later, we were organising a campaign at my university to prevent Margaret Thatcher being awarded an honorary doctorate. I wrote scores of formulaic letters to prominent figures asking them to put their name to our cause. Not only was Benn one of the few to reply, he telephoned me personally to assure us of his support. There was a humanity about the man, not just in the kind of genuine, personal, attention to individuals of which I had experience and of which numerous stories are being told today (see, for example, redcathy here), but also in the warmth with which he writes about friends and families in his diaries and above all in his deeply moving love for his wife Caroline. Tony Benn came to believe that politics was a matter of struggle, of taking sides and fighting, but unlike so many he did not allow this to dent his humanity. He was not the kind of left-wing leader to whom Gramsci's self-critical words from the Prison Notebooks could be applied,

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

Benn's starting point was that people mattered and this was lived out with a consistency not evident in today's political class.

His commitment to a politics of struggle, and to socialism (in the proper sense of that word), arose out of his experience of government in the Wilson and Callaghan years. The insights from this period caused him to give serious critical attention to the manner in which institutions - both  State and internal to the Labour Party - hinder the implementation of socialist policies. Benn is not always given sufficient credit as a political thinker but this analysis led to the development of a distinctive emphasis on democracy as integral to socialist advance; the Bennite Left focused on the democratisation of the Labour Party (the electoral college was a fruit of this, recently consigned to history by Benn's one-time intern Ed Miliband), whilst Benn himself argued for radical constitutional reform. The young, left-wing, Peter Hain correctly claimed the Bennite movement for 'libertarian socialism'.

Benn's mature politics echoed one of the best lines of Billy Bragg's dubious reworking of the Internationale 'change does not come from above'. His vision was one of a labour movement working in combination with grassroots movements of all kinds, developing alternatives to capitalism-as-usual and demanding of parliamentarians that they act in support of this vision, this demand being backed up by the teeth of democratic institutions. At its height this politics gave rise to a unique moment in Labour Party history. The Bash-Fisher book puts it like this,

The Bennite left... embraced and responded to newly emerging forces - a radicalised left in local government around the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Lambeth and other London boroughs; a feminist women's movement that left a lasting impact on most sections of the socialist movement; and the movement for Black and Asian representation in the Labour Party and beyond.

Now, there are problems with the 'don't mourn, organise' line. It lacks humanity, fails to acknowledge loss. A socialist who tells you not to stand by the grave and weep because the struggle continues is no better than a religious fundamentalist who tells you not to cry because the departed has passed on to better things. But we should at least mourn and organise. And those of us who remain in the Labour Party could do a lot worse than attempt to breathe back some of the life of the heady early 1980s to our local parties. What were once places of intense political debate, connected to local campaigns in communities far broader than the place of meeting, have become in many places little more than convenient holding pens for electoral volunteers. Debate is as absent as the democracy that depends on it, meanwhile the political enthusiasm of a generation is being poured out in numerous autonomous campaigns - around education, housing, LBGTQ liberation, the environment, and anti-imperialism - which seem a million miles away from a Labour Party dressed up in business suits and mouthing empty promises to a sky-blue backdrop.

Tony Benn, by his own admission, made mistakes. He had the humility to learn from many of them. His greatest error was undoubtedly insufficient opposition to the Eastern Bloc regimes. More recently he unfortunately lent his support to Julian Assange. But, when all is said and done, the spirit of Tony Benn is something of which the Labour Party, and the wider world, stands in desperate need.

Friday Video Corner

R.I.P. Tony Benn 1925-2014

"The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all."