Category: Politics

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Alex Politics

On Radden Keefe’s ‘Say Nothing’ and my childhood in Belfast

1. Slieve Mish

I spent part of my childhood living in Lisburn, a small city just outside of Belfast (the capital of Northern Ireland). While I was too young to remember any of my first stint there, the latter took place when I was between the ages of 11 and 13. I remember those years fondly: we had a large but cold house, and I spent my school holidays hiking in the Mourne mountains, attending Ice Hockey games—Belfast (still!) have the best team in the UK—and shopping at Hollister. But if I came to understand anything from my time in the North, it was precisely how little I, or British people in general, truly understand about our little, yet historically and politically tumultuous, territory across the Irish Sea.

Even some fifteen years after the Good Friday Agreement officially ended the Troubles—Northern Ireland’s thirty-year civil war—its ominous memory continued to hang over my experience. I lived in a military encampment, and it just so happened that my house was next to the perimeter of the base; from my bedroom window, I could just about peer over the towering walls of concrete, corrugated metal, and razor wire, bristling with CCTV cameras, into the civilian neighbourhood beyond. These glimpses were most of what I saw of the place: I was required to flash my ID at guards equipped with full body armour, submachine guns, and attack dogs to even leave my neighbourhood. Once out in public, I was placed under strict orders of clandestineness: speak in a low voice, wear no clothing with the words “England” clearly on it—even my football socks from the 2012 Euros campaign were expressly banned—and do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone what your dad does for work.

Outside of the personal level, too, I encountered the realities of a country still wholly run by deeply-rooted sectarianism. Friend groups, schools, and entire neighbourhoods were wholly split on Protestant and Catholic lines; unsurprisingly, being an Army kid, the youth camps I went to during the summers were entirely attended by the former group. So divided were the cultures that you could generally tell someone’s background from their name alone, or even from looking at their houses: the stereotype suggests that Protestants almost always have blinds in their windows, while Catholics have lace curtains. Speaking to people from the North more recently, I learned an even more ridiculous dividing line: while Catholics tend to keep their toasters on the counter in their kitchens, Protestants would store them in the cupboard (admittedly, I am still unaware of the reasoning behind this particular quirk). A brilliant scene from Derry Girls highlights just how strongly these divides still express themselves in Northern Irish culture—and, indeed, just about how out-of-place I felt as an English boy deposited in this environment.

As a tween, I didn’t really question such peculiarities, many of which now seem absurd when I recount them to Brits my age—as a military brat, you grow used to obediently adapting to new environments. But while I didn’t properly comprehend the full historical context that led to my circumstances, I think what stuck with me was the collective sense of trauma and suppressed violent tendencies that still pervaded Belfast: the uneasy calm of a former warzone at peace for now, but which could rapidly spark again given the right circumstances. That’s the Northern Ireland I knew. It felt like standing atop a dormant volcano.

My father, my brother and I in the Mourne Mountains. 2014.

2. Tales of the Troubles

Now, I hardly blame anyone my age from Britain (note: as opposed to the UK) for not knowing much about the Troubles, or, indeed, about Ireland itself. The national History curriculum, or at least what I was taught, relatively conveniently circumvents any and all mention of the UK’s violent, crime-ridden colonial past. Even dealing with colonies such as India and Africa seemed to be relatively taboo, never mind approaching something as recent, as painful, and as outright criminal as many of the UK government’s actions in Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; going further back, events such as the Potato Famine or the War of Independence were almost wholly ignored, the latter even when I studied World War I and the interwar period in the UK and Europe. The most mention Belfast ever got was for its role in building the Titanic a century ago. On a broader level, such deliberate educational oversight provides a decent explanation, and a worrying precedent, for Westminster politicians’ pervasive lack of knowledge of and attention paid to Northern Ireland (see Brexit, for an emphatic example). It is a history both incredibly relevant to our own country, and which has the capacity to teach us valuable lessons about similar struggles in the world today. Equally, though, I used to think that one could read all the history books on the North and still not quite resonate with it on a personal level; at least, not in the way that I feel I somewhat can after having lived there.

Recent events have changed this view somewhat. In February, my friend Mira came across from the US to stay with me in Edinburgh; having just been in Ireland, she’d picked up an interesting-looking book to give me as a thanks. The book in question was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, an account of the Troubles and the so-called Provisional IRA’s role in them. In short, I was blown away. The thing I think this book executes so masterfully is its choice of tone and structure: rather than merely being a factual history book, Radden Keefe chooses to write in narrative non-fiction. The result is an account of the conflict from the point of view of the complex, nuanced, and fundamentally human people who lived through it. There’s Dolours Price, the daughter of an IRA veteran who moves from peaceful protesting to more radical means. Or Brendan Hughes, the gritty ground commander who sacrifices his marriage and, at times, his morals, for a cause he believes to be unstoppable and fundamentally just. Or Gerry Adams, the later-famous Sinn Fein President who had a murky and contested career in the field. Many more such characters come into the fray (you’ll have to read it yourself to learn about them), but the real narrative hook of the story focuses on the family of Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten in a mixed Protestant-Catholic family who, one evening in 1972, was suddenly kidnapped by her neighbours and never seen again. Radden Keefe focuses on recounting McConville’s broken family’s story over the following decades, and perhaps unturning some further stones in the mystery of her fate. Using this to provide a centrepoint for the book is an excellent tool for exploring the Troubles’ impact, as well as their memory and how it’s presented, on Belfast’s unwitting and innocent inhabitants.

Now, there is only so much which can be covered without turning into a history textbook: Say Nothing pays little attention to the conflict outside of Belfast and the crimes of loyalist insurgents such as the Ulster Defence Force, while a broader account of how the peace process came to light was also slightly lacking. But the point of this isn’t an accurate historical overview of the conflict: for that, you can go to a textbook or Wikipedia. The book’s aim, instead, is to transport the reader into Troubles-era Belfast by placing them into the stories of the people who lived through it. Aside from this direction allowing the book to provide an account which is riveting and undeniably human—so much so that I tore through the book in two days—it also helps to encapsulate and communicate to the reader that same feeling of division and unease that I often felt when I lived in Belfast (which, incidentally, is the same time that the book was written). That, in itself, makes Say Nothing an absolute landmark. Indeed, I reckon that UK politics would be in a much better position were all politicians—or even everyone—mandatorily forced to read it.

If that doesn’t come as enough of a recommendation, I don’t know what would.

My copy of Say Nothing. 2024.

3. An addendum on Ireland and Palestine

In terms of the lessons we might apply from the Troubles to the modern day, a particular line from Say Nothing really stuck with me. The following is written on p. 259 (in my version):

“Part of the reason that such a process [as truth and reconciliation] was feasible in South Africa was that in the aftermath of apartheid, there was an obvious winner. The Troubles, by contrast, concluded in stalemate”.

Now, I’ve stated several times in the past year that I’m not in the business of presenting concrete solutions to the conflict and occupation in Israel and Palestine: many more qualified and informed people than me have attempted it, and all have failed. But having previously put a lot of weight on South Africa as the best template we’ve got in terms of where on earth to start with a peace process, reading this book gave me a lot of cause for reconsideration. The Troubles, after all, have a lot in common with what we see in Gaza today: an embittered battle between a modernised, Western state army and a generational, rag-tag paramilitary organisation, ostensibly in the name of an oppressed group’s liberation from a foreign force on one hand, and the violent cessation of the rebels’ existence on the other. Neither goal is easily achieved even if it is realistic; war crimes abound on both sides. Crucially, though, outside of the total annexation of Palestine by Israel—an outcome that worryingly seems more and more possible by the day—I don’t see this conflict ending in anything other than a ceasefire and a stalemate. As the Provos knew then and Hamas knows now, overcoming the occupier is impossible; meanwhile, as the UK knew and Israel knows, crushing a rebel movement by force is impossible (though I can say for a fact that this is not the true aim of at least some members of Netanyahu’s cabinet). The issue is, of course, far more complex than this vague outline suggests. But the similarities may render the Troubles one of the best templates we’ve got for working out some sort of just resolution.

As the book details, the Good Friday Agreement was far from perfect. Many victims of the Troubles felt betrayed by its existence, and its terms and spirit have been largely defiled in the subsequent years (cough cough Brexit cough cough). But in providing an adequate political solution focused on amnesty and peacebuilding from both sides, it achieved far more than 30 further years of violence ever could have. Now, I’m not informed enough to offer more of a deep dive into the intricacies of each peace agreement; there are far better resources on that out there. But what I do know is that while the Belfast I knew was divided, tense, and fundamentally haunted by the spectre of its past, at least it wasn’t a bloody warzone. That is the least that kids in Gaza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and beyond deserve right now. Someday, I hope that their stories are told with the same care, and their humanity is as well conveyed, as Radden Keefe has done here.

Now, if anyone has any good book recommendations about potatoes, I’d best get reading…

Buy Say Nothing at the Lighthouse here, or through your local independent bookshop.

Categories
Politics

For Posterity: some thoughts on the morning after

The White House, Washington, D.C. 2022. Photo by me.

Just to clarify what I meant here, a day later: I don’t think Trump is on the level of genocidal maniac that Hitler was. Nonetheless, my point is that while last time was survivable, I fear the instability and suffering that he will be able to cause as a result of his increased unaccountability, in the US and across the world, will be palpable.
—07/11

About six years ago in History class, I studied the fall of a thriving and progressive democracy. One that faced troubles with economic management (which, to be fair, were far worse) which, alongside conservative pushback, led to the rise of a charismatic right-wing populist. A man who staged abortive coups, who baselessly used vulnerable and minority groups as scapegoats for the world’s ills, who promised simple, violent solutions (including economic autarky) to complex problems. A man who infiltrated a right-wing establishment which, after initial rebuke, spinelessly embraced and uplifted him as their leader, fearing for the sake of their political livelihoods that they had no choice but to do so.

Now, comparisons between Trump and Hitler are at least eight years out of date at this point (ask JD Vance). But waking up after five hours of sleep this morning, I wonder if the same mood of listless, confused fear that spirals around my head now was the same that my ancestors felt in 1933. I wonder if my undocumented, queer, and trans friends in the US feel the same disbelief young Jewish Germans felt at their own generation’s brazen sacrifice of their wellbeing in the polls, the same unabashed dread they once felt when they were told they would be disenfranchised, deported, decimated. I wonder if the children of Ukraine and Gaza resonate with the children of Austria, Ethiopia, Manchuria, Poland, when they were told their homes would be conquered, carved up, cleansed.

America today is not Germany in 1933. The latter was a country that was economically destitute and multilaterally sanctioned; the former is the most powerful economy and military in the world. Comparisons, nonetheless, abound. Both have their supporting casts: von Schleicher and Vance the hypocritical lackeys, Hindenburg and McConnell (or even Biden) the cowardly kingmakers. In each case, the stage is now set: far more so than in 2016, any remnants of checks and balances are now eroded. And in the case of Germany, which was fundamentally a far less significant power, it took twelve years to slaughter millions and fundamentally reshape the structure of the world. I’m not saying that we’re necessarily headed in the same direction, but I can’t now say with any certainty that we’re not.

I don’t know where we go from here; I could study two more Politics degrees and still be unable to tell you. But I don’t know how anyone deals with the problem of an unchecked fascist at the head of the most powerful country in the world. We learned from the futility of appeasing Hitler with Putin in Ukraine; with our chief ally, though, my government has already had no choice but to bend the knee. Now, there’s a strong chance here that I’m in a severe spiral and that everything will have the chance to flip back to normal in four years’ time; there’s also a chance that the “normal” I’ve lived my life in will never return again. I can no longer rely on the former. Regardless, History will judge us for our actions and inaction today the same way it has judged our 1930s contemporaries.

All in all, this is either just a bad day or the beginning of the end. Nonetheless, Australia is about the only Western country without a significant fascist movement right now; I remember Sydney as being beautiful around this time of year…

In the meantime, look after each other. We all we got.
—A x
06/11/24

Categories
Featured Politics

Nine common misconceptions about my views on Palestine and anti-Zionism

My Keffiyeh at home. Edinburgh, October 2023.

The past two months have been incredibly difficult, both for my friends linked to the area and politically engaged people in the North Atlantic. I sincerely hope you’re all feeling safe.

However, in that time, I have both engaged in conversations and seen others online in which several things are suggested about me and others who share similar stances which are patently untrue. I thought it appropriate to outline a few of them in order to make my views clear.

NB. I’m not going to hyperlink to all of the facts here, but all are things I’ve previously read and can try and dig up for you if you really want to see them.

1. You don’t care about Palestinians, you just hate Jews, Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, etc.

Let me start by making clear the difference here. When I talk about Jewish people, I mean the ethnic group; when I talk about Zionists, I mean the political movement. The two have a lot of overlap, yes, however not all Jewish people are Zionists, nor are all Zionists Jewish. Look at the millions of Zionists in the West loudly supporting Israel and its actions—many of them are not Jewish. Look at Arthur James Balfour, the creator of the eponymous declaration and thus a critical supporter of Zionism, who was not only not Jewish but was also an avowed antisemite (he referred to them as “alien and even hostile” in 1919). In a political sense, I oppose all of these Zionist individuals and groups, and support the many Jewish people (including my friends in the UK and US, as well as organisers for Jewish Voice for Peace and similar organisations) who share my views.

Equally, I acknowledge and am abhorred by rising antisemitism in the West today, and stand unequivocally with the Jewish community in opposing it. Under no circumstances should they be associated with the actions of Israel, or face hatred or discrimination of any kind.

2. There are genocides and war crimes happening all over the world—why do you only seem to care about Israel and Palestine (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

I care about the others, too—I wrote a piece about the Uighur genocide in China a few years ago, which I largely stand by (though my views on the Falun Gong cult have been emphatically enlightened since). What is important about Palestine is both the speed at which people are dying, as well as the emphatic indifference and outright support of governments that claim to represent me and the values I hold dear towards it. The governments of the UK and US are explicitly allied with Israel, and largely support its military-industrial complex—they have the power to change its policies. Moreover, the UK helped to start this mess in the first place: we have a disproportionate responsibility to help fix it. As citizens, we, too, need to pressure our governments to change their tack before it is too late (if it isn’t already, or wasn’t a month, two months, or several decades ago).

3. When you refer to Israel, do you blame all of the citizens of the country for its government’s actions (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

Okay, this one is honestly a bit weird, but I’ve actually had it thrown at me quite a few times. The answer is obviously not, and I am really not sure where you get that idea from. When I accuse China of genocide, I don’t implicate my Chinese friends in that definition; when I accuse the US or the UK of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t implicate myself, my friends or, indeed, my own family (several of whom were sent there). I am referring to the states and their government, not the citizens: when I say “Israel”, I mean the state and government of Israel, not the citizens of Israel (or Jewish people anywhere for that matter). I hope that’s clear.

Scaffolding on the Royal Mile. Edinburgh, November 2023.

4. Majority states of other religions and ethnicities exist everywhere—why do you oppose the existence of Israel, the only Jewish one, and not others (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

There is a difference between countries happening to have a majority of one religion largely due to historical and ethnographic reasons, and one which enforces it as a part of government policy (I know it’s not in the constitution, but look seriously at their actions). Israel’s current population is created as part of a campaign to form a gerrymandered ethno-state, and this comes at the direct expense of Palestinians. The easiest example of this direction being enacted is the international Jewish diaspora being given the “right of return” to Israel, but indigenous Palestinians not being allowed to enter at all, even if they were born there. What else could explain this?

In a broader sense, I don’t think that biblical or genetic lineage denotes some sort of rightful claim to a land (because if so, Palestinians have just as much right if not more to the place, and I can claim a swathe of land in Kenya, where humanity is believed to have emerged from, and claim my rightful home is there). However, what I do believe is in free movement, freedom from persecution, and the fact that many Jewish people feel a cultural and religious affinity with the area. For all of those reasons, Jewish people should be allowed a home in Israel/Palestine should they so desire it. But that home cannot be forced to be only for Jewish people at the direct expense of indigenous Palestinians, who have the exact same rights (and are being denied all three by Israel at present).

So, I don’t oppose the right of Jewish people to live in the area at all; what I oppose, however, is the creation of an exclusive and exclusionary Jewish state on land they had no right to take in the first place.

5. Why don’t you care about the hostages (heavy implication of not caring about innocent Jewish people ie. antisemitism)?

To reiterate my stance: the hostages should come home. But two major things need addressing here. Firstly, why aren’t we talking about the thousands of innocent Palestinians held in Israeli jails without charge, in a breach of international law, who have been for years (though there are more now than ever), and who regularly report facing torture while incarcerated? And secondly, you should be asking that of Netanyahu’s government, who have been carpet-bombing Gaza over the past two months despite having no knowledge of where the hostages currently are. I’m not an expert military strategist, but I know enough to be sure that their actions do not indicate a primary desire to get those people home—if it was what they wanted, they wouldn’t put a single extra one of them at risk. Many of the hostages’ families have criticised the Israeli government along the same lines.

6. “From the river to the sea” (and other common cries for Palestinian liberation) call for the eradication of all Jewish people (explicit accusation of antisemitism)!!!

Wording in Politics is tricky, because there will always be someone who attempts to twist what you say the wrong way (as I’ve seen from the responses to my recent article in the DP). To be clear: some of those who use that phrase do truly desire that (just as antisemites such as Balfour wanted to get rid of Jewish people by sending them to Israel). But calls for liberation do not necessarily indicate the negation of the rights of others. To use what is a tired metaphor by this point, “Black Lives Matter” never meant to say that white ones didn’t, too: its point was that black lives were treated as somehow lesser than others. In a similar vein, Israelis are afforded the right to live in freedom across the area (and even illegally in Palestinian territory), whereas Palestinians from East Jerusalem, where they are annexed by Israel but not afforded citizenship, to Gaza, where they have lived under a decades-long blockade and now a brutal siege, are not. Calls for Palestinian liberation are rooted in a desire for them to be able to live freely in their ancestral homeland: that doesn’t mean that Jewish people can’t, too. The original charter of Likud, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the entire area to be under total Jewish control.

The Lighthouse bookshop. Edinburgh, November 2023.

7. But the Palestinians elected Hamas (implying they deserve this)! Hamas is bad!

Elections last occurred in 2006. Given that almost half of Gaza’s population are children, it’s safe to say that a decided minority of them were able to vote at that point. There is also extensive evidence that Netanyahu’s government has deliberately propped up the organisation for years in a facet of its “divide and conquer” strategy.

I don’t believe in collective punishment (not least because it’s a war crime), and especially not for the actions of a government most of the people did not elect and do nothing to support.

Moreover, Hamas’ violence is not justifiable under any circumstances, but I don’t realistically understand what else you could possibly expect to happen when you limit Gaza’s movement, electricity, food, water, building supplies, etc. while your army can continue to bomb them whenever they want with impunity. It’s a vicious and hugely complex cycle of violence, perpetrated by both sides. However, it’s one that Israel, with its hilariously larger military and financial power as well as its purported democratic values, has the ability and the responsibility to fix. We should hold our allies to a higher standard.

8. Israel is just defending itself (also implying I don’t believe it should be able to)!

I’m sorry, but I can’t take you seriously if you honestly believe that killing 5,500+ children constitutes self-defence. It is, to put it lightly, retaliatory offence. There are other ways of eliminating a threat, such as targeted military raids, that don’t put literal millions of civilians at risk. I grew up in a military family stretching back at least four generations on both sides, and I don’t know a single honourable soldier who wouldn’t risk their own life to save innocent children, no matter where they come from: that’s why they join up in the first place. I wish the Israeli military were the same, rather than explicitly stating the opposite in their policies and actions.

9. This issue is too complex for you to understand: you’re just naïve (and antisemitic) to think you’re informed enough to speak out about it!

I’ve been reading about this issue and following it for several years—I didn’t suddenly start caring on October 7th, and I get my information from academic books and journalists on the ground, not TikTok (as I’ve been accused of doing; I don’t even use TikTok). With that said, I’m nothing even approaching an expert: many parts of it, such as finding an enduring solution to this trauma-embedded and deeply contested area, are indeed incredibly complex. Statespeople of far better standing than I will ever achieve have tried and failed to solve it.

Some things, however, are emphatically black and white: the ones I have attempted to outline here are a few of them.

—

There is always more to learn about this—on an experiential and academic level, I am far from the most informed on it, and I haven’t covered everything here, but I know enough to tell you that what is going on currently must stop.

I hope you find this useful. Message or email me with any thoughts and responses, and keep having the important conversations with those around you about this. The only way we meaningfully change anything is by uniting together to sway hearts and minds.

Take care of yourselves ❤

—AB, 28/11/23

A student-run protest for Palestinian liberation. Edinburgh, October 2023.

All photos used in this article are taken and owned by me.

Categories
Alex Politics

On Anti-Zionism

This is a piece I wrote for the DP in November last year, but never made it out due to Kanye opening his mouth (for the record, I haven’t listened to a Kanye track since). In light of recent events, I thought it best to publish it here now. —AB ❤

Image by me

“Last month, several Zionist groups raised outcry at an incident on Northwestern campus, in which a student op-ed on Jewish pride was posted around campus with the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” painted on it in prominent red letters. The Jerusalem Post accused it of being a “use of hateful rhetoric and [a] public, targeted attack on Jewish identity”: in other words, yet another example of unsolicited antisemitic violence from pro-Palestinian activists on an American University campus.

Two important and problematic claims require unpacking here: first, that this public statement was an uncalled-for escalation, and secondly (in a very linked point) that the phrase itself is inherently antisemitic.

The first claim falls apart with a reading of the original article. The piece itself is a beautiful expression of the author’s Jewish pride, and her refusal to meter it in a world that ever seeks to silence and oppress it. It ends with an attempt to reach over the table: to invite those who may oppose her to engage with her, and even to come to a Shabbat dinner with her to better understand her point of view. Especially as a student coming from a country where Jewish culture is much less pronounced, I especially have felt lucky to be able to come to a place like Penn and be able to understand that culture better, and truly appreciate those like her who are willing to let me into their world.

However, her article contains a key caveat, which her Zionist supporters seized on: she calls out the phrase “From the River to the Sea” as “a rallying cry to destroy the entire State of Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants”. This is the phrase that pro-Palestine activists had emphasised in their response, but an aspect of her piece that had been emphatically ignored by the articles that came out condemning the response to it.

The second claim, which the author also made in her piece, is a much more contentious one that requires deeper scrutiny. Nonetheless, I believe that it mistakenly mischaracterises the entire Palestinian movement and its allies in a manner which aims to paint them as hateful antisemites. The truth is far from this narrative.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organisation which has been increasingly accused of bullying Anti-Zionist groups and wrongfully accusing them of white supremacy, defines “From the River to the Sea” as a phrase defined by most of its proponents as a call for the destruction of Israel and its people. They provide essentially no evidence for this claim. Now, while I’m sure that far too many examples in which individuals have twisted the phrase into this horrible meaning—the Anti-Zionist movement in my own country has faced deep issues with antisemitism very recently—to define this entire movement in this fashion is strongly mischaracterising it. The phrase itself has existed since long before its sub-group of antisemitic adopters. In itself, it calls for a Palestine made whole again: free from the settler-colonialist violence that plagues it and has already killed almost 150 this year, and continues to create and enforce illegal settlements in violation of international law. That Palestine need not be exclusive of Jewish people. Quite the opposite: I believe as much in their right to settle in their ancestral homeland as much as I support Palestinians’ right to return to theirs. But today’s Palestine is characterised by an enforced partition that keeps its citizens from their families, their religious sites and their ancestral homes, and most of all keeps everyone from any sort of lasting, mutual peace. At best, Palestinian ideas of peace requiring throwing Israelis into the sea are outdated; at worst, they have been created and perpetuated by Israeli media.

I’m not attempting to claim that things would be perfect if the roles were reversed and Palestine held all of the power. I’m sure, in fact, that the result could easily involve as intense, if not worse, discrimination against Jewish people. But such caveats cannot permit the current state of unbalanced violence that exists today: not standing up against it would be a betrayal of our morals and our activism.

This mischaracterisation stretches to Penn, too: a Jewish friend of mine told me lately how she had to explain to a passerby that the display of a Palestinian flag on campus was not, in fact, a flagrant display of antisemitism. For a campus and community that stands so strongly for progressive values, it saddens and angers me that were able to be blinded by such naivety over an issue that is so pressing and so lopsided.

I am not Jewish. Nor am I Palestinian. Yet due to this precedent, I feel scared to use my voice in support of Palestine, for fear of my words and my character being twisted into something that I stand as much against as I do Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people. My stance against Zionism in its current state is unequivocally exclusive from my absolute opposition to antisemitism in its increasingly prevalent, multi-faceted and vicious forms. I am tired of the two being convoluted.

That said, I am deeply committed to open dialogue on this incredibly important issue. Please send me an email, a DM, or an invitation to dinner—over my table or especially over yours. Resolution and peace are built over an approach built on understanding, not on division. If you’ve read this far, then I thank you for lending me your ear. Now please let me lend you mine.”

—27/11/2022 – 19/10/2023

Categories
Archive Politics

Archive: Why a Universal Basic Income is a Good Idea

This is part of a debate series over at 1828, the IEA’s online magazine. You can see the original article here:
https://www.1828.org.uk/2022/07/04/debate-is-universal-basic-income-a-good-idea/

One of my favourite quotes on UBI is the Rutger Bregman slogan: “Poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash”.

Our current benefits system seems to believe the opposite—it blames the poor for their position, forcing them to cut through countless lines of red tape just to get the cash they need to survive. But this constant state nannying is far from fixing the problem—most sources show relatively constant poverty rates of an insane 20%. Wasting all of your energy proving your poverty to the state is both humiliating and directly counterintuitive to what our benefits system should be aimed at doing: getting people out of poverty.

Enter UBI, a policy that aims to tackle this issue from a practical and an ideological standpoint. As a form of welfare, UBI is the purest form of individualistic libertarianism: rather than micromanaging, compartmentalising and dictating the path out of poverty, it puts the cash in the hands of the people that need it and lets them do it themselves. The upcoming trials in Wales will speak for themselves, but studies from Scandinavia to the infamous Speenhamland demonstrate that this simplification and liberalization is far more efficient and effective than standard welfare—some studies have shown that basic income schemes can even save tax money. Suggesting that the poor will waste away this vital stipend rather than investing it in themselves is both deeply derogatory to their character as well as being a plain misunderstanding of the data.

From an ideological standpoint, giving this money to everyone establishes it as a basic right. Yes, many of us are fortunate enough not to need the extra cash, but the fact that we all get it makes UBI a privilege that absolutely does not discriminate; one that we can rely on should we need it, without having to report when and how we use it to a state who has no business knowing. As citizens of our society, then, UBI guarantees everyone a minimum standard of living—no questions asked. Is that not something we should have been aiming for all along?

Photo credit:  Nick Pampoukidis on Unsplash.

Categories
Archive Politics

Archive – Covid Regulations are Letting Students Down

Hi! This is another op-ed I wrote for The Student earlier this month. I just wanted to note that this piece was written before the identification of the Omicron Covid variant, so all views expressed here should be taken within the context of when I published them. What’s going on as I write this now is a wholly different picture.
Enjoy!
–AB, 31/12/2021

In an unsurprising yet disappointing move, Durham University announced this week that all of its exams for the 2021/22 period are going to remain online. Edinburgh will not be far behind: in an email to students from Colm Harmon in late October, prospects for further opening this year were made out as overwhelmingly bleak, with the narrative of “community protection” yet again being touted as an explanation. However, while I do understand that Universities want to be seen as being concerned about the still-relevant pandemic, I find their repeated insistence on unnecessary hesitance to be utterly transparent.

Having joined Edinburgh last September, I faced a first-year experience in which I visited George Square a grand total of zero times for academic purposes. Whenever I happened to walk by, seeing the tumbleweed-worthy ghost town it had become was possibly the starkest possible reminder of how much I was missing out on. I wasn’t so much going to university as I was watching lectures from my bed—there were some days that I didn’t even find an excuse to leave my flat. In most cases, though, I at least understood why things had to be this way: after all, we were in the depths of a global health crisis, and jeopardising others’ safety was the least of my priorities.

Having returned this year to a world of vaccinations, re-openings, and a safe-ish semi-normal, life has certainly been much less depressing: studying in the Main Library and seeing our brutalist, concreted oblong of a campus at least slightly inhabited again makes me feel somewhat like a real student. But though the situation has come forwards in leaps and bounds since the state it was in a year ago, I have two more in-person activities per week to show for it—if I’m honest, that doesn’t feel like anywhere near enough.

I play for the American Football team here; one of our main sponsors is the famed Whynot nightclub, which we visit every Wednesday. Along with about eight other sports societies and hordes of others, we make a total of some six hundred hungry hedonists: flashing our vaccine passports, we pay for entry to spend the night drinking, dancing and otherwise breaking social distancing guidelines until about three in the morning. These activities all happen with the blessing of the law and the University—nightclub-society sponsors are even encouraged by the SU. My point is this: if even one Covid-positive person were to head to Whynot (or any other of Edinburgh’s countless clubs, pubs, and other venues) that night, they would be in prime position to go on a super-spreading rampage. Now I am no virologist, but I can guarantee that if 600 fully-vaccinated students (far more than most courses here actually have enrolled) were to head into a distanced lecture (or exam) hall wearing masks, the risk would be nothing like that of a packed nightclub on a busy evening. The story is similar at Durham and across the country—there is absolutely no logical reason for universities to allow us to go clubbing while forcing us to watch lectures on a computer screen.

As for who is to blame for this abhorrent double standard—whether it be lecturers complaining, Universities being lazy, or governments being hypocritical—it is hard to tell. But what is clear is that students are still being disproportionately hurt by the impacts of inconsistent pandemic guidelines. We need to ask more questions of those who claim to represent us; I, for one, will be taking the next round of excuses they offer with a heavy dose of salt.

Featured Image: Main Library, George Square, October 2021. Image taken and owned by me.

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Archive Politics

Archive- Brexit was never about a US Trade Deal

This is my first opinion piece for Edinburgh University’s student newspaper, The Student; it’s also the first time my work has been published in print, which is pretty cool. I’ll be trying to write a lot more for them in the future, so watch this space! If you’re reading this the week it comes out, there should still be a few copies available: try Teviot, Black Medicine or the Main Library if you’d like to pick one up.
–AB x

Let me ask you a simple question: why did the UK public vote for Brexit?

Was it due to fatigue with the tedious bureaucracy of Brussels? Did they believe that some short-term economic strife would be worth the increased flexibility that freedom from the single market would allow? Or was it due to Johnson and Farage’s slick charisma and can-do attitude?

While all of these factors definitively played a role in swinging the vote, I think that each misses the core of the issue. The thing is, people that voted to Leave were majoratively not particularly concerned with the nitty-gritty details of immigration laws and bilateral trade agreements. Rather, in something of a precursor to the era of politics that has proceeded it, the vote was driven by that raw and almost irrational desire for independence and sovereignty. The details didn’t matter, really: those could be left for the politicians to sort out. As my Nan put it to my (visibly exasperated) parents at the time, she voted Leave because she “wanted our empire back”.

However, as Liz Truss is learning the hard way on her recent catapulting into the role of Foreign Secretary, the “sorting out” part of that fool-proof plan is much easier said than done.

In June 2016, while the Leave/Remain Debate was busy heating to melting point, then-US President Barack Obama delivered a pessimistic prophecy on the final UK visit of his term: despite campaigners’ insistence that an agreement would be imminent in the years following the referendum, Brexit Britain would be at the “back of the line” as far as American trade deals were concerned. Vote Leave dismissed this as nonsense at the time, reminding us that Obama would soon be out of office, meaning that a deal could be put through right away with his successor. Two Presidential elections and five years of negotiations later, though, the Biden administration has held no punches in informing our government that their long-promised bilateral partnership would not be materialising any time soon.

Now, the natural reaction to all this would be to guffaw at our short-sighted, xenophobic compatriots. In their defence, Truss’ speech at this week’s Conservative Party conference assured listeners that the US prioritising relations with countries such as India and Japan over us was nothing to worry about, and that we should strengthen our other alliances, too. While I think she is right, this is still hardly the “Global Britain” we were promised, never mind my grandmother’s reveries of an empire revived. But despite the fact that I, along with a host of pessimistic Remainers (and likely most Vote Leave politicians), absolutely saw this coming, the childish “I-told-you-so” victory that the UK’s floundering trade status provides us is profoundly hollow. At the end of the day, Leave voters were not in it for economic stability and trade negotiations—theirs was a vote for ideological independence. If this was what it would take to get that, then so be it; the sneers of the cosmopolitan minority will never make them regret their decision.

This new period of identity politics is so potent, and so potentially dangerous, because utopian ideas run the show—sometimes seemingly taking precedence over reality. These ideals, when harnessed correctly, can be the building blocks for a better world; we must be careful, though, lest they be used to tear the current one apart at its foundations. Though the Brexit vote has not yet led to the latter, it will be up to politicians like Truss to fulfil their promises and forge us a more prosperous future. After all, who needs America anyway?

Image Credit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58613389
I do not own or benefit from any images used.

Categories
Archive Politics

Archive- The Crisis of Identity in British Politics

This one is a big deal for me, as it’s actually my first ever properly published article. While interning at the IEA, I was told about 1828 and that they were looking for writers, so I got in touch: the rest is history, really. You can find my article over at https://www.1828.org.uk/2021/08/23/the-crisis-of-identity-in-british-politics/; with a bit of luck and a lot of work, this will just be the beginning.
–AB, 31/8/2021 x

Politics, at its core, is the art of identity. It’s a method of placing labels on ourselves, and defining where we stand in public society — whether we’re conservative or liberal, leftist or rightist, authoritarian or libertarian, and anything in between, they’re the flags we fly on our ideological galleons.

While incredibly arbitrary, though, these labels are essential not only for self-definition but for finding and joining with others who share those same views. It is then that we can really set about conveying our vision to the rest of the world.

It’s on this basis that all political parties and organisations stand; they exist in order to rally together politicians and voters alike under one unifying banner. While these institutions may often seem unbreakable, the thin links that bind them are dangerously vulnerable to shocks —and when a new issue emerges that divides the crew in two, they can be shaken at their very foundations.

It’s pretty obvious to see that we’re going through such a paradigm shift right now: starting in 2016, really, we’ve seen our political climate become increasingly torn between traditional left-right economic arguments and a new axis of nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, which was ultimately defined by the storm of the Brexit vote (where the Remain side discovered that arguments relying on economics held little water). It is how our political parties respond to this change in the tides that will dictate their success now and for many years to come.

The Conservative Party, specifically, is the perfect example of this scramble to work out where it stands in these strange waters. Much like many right-wing parties today, it’s divided between two very distinct halves, both in its voters and its representatives: essentially, between traditional, middle-to-upper-class Conservatives under the old guard such as Commander Cameron and Admiral Johnson’s barmy Brexit Army, which taps into a younger voter base as well as the swathes of Vote-Leavers in the Red Wall.

As we saw with their 2019 landslide, the Tories have very effectively consolidated these groups with their “Getting Brexit Done” shtick, uniting both their passionate Leave voters a well as tired Remainer conservatives. But this unity won’t last forever, and I fear that the leaks have already begun to show: for evidence of that, one only need look at by-elections in Buckinghamshire and the outright mutiny of a former (and vocally anti-Brexit) Conservative Speaker to the Opposition. This last point, especially given the sorry state of Captain Hindsight’s Labour Party (due largely to the exact same issues), sets a worrying precedent for the Conservatives’ future.

So, what happens now? If you dismantle the Conservative Party and build it back up again, will it still be the same ship?

It is unlikely that the party will collapse, but if it continues on its current course, it will struggle to maintain its current popularity in future. It is today faced with an all-important choice: it can go back to the Tory party of before, or it can decide on a new identity of Brexit-fuelled, nationalist authoritarianism. It certainly seems that they are headed for the latter: if they elect to steer towards that dangerous route, I see moderates and liberals alike jumping overboard (as they have already started to do) before an iceberg is struck.

Identity is so powerful because it gives political actors purpose: without a strong sense of where exactly you stand, voters won’t be compelled to stand behind you. In a world which is increasingly defined by ideological clashes, this sense of who you are is only becoming more important; it will be up to politicians to conclusively choose which flag they want to fly, lest their supporters abandon them as a result. After all, how can you be expected to control the direction of a country if you can’t even decide your own?

Image Credit: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-brands-fellow-tory-19610727
I neither own nor profit from the use of images on this page.

Categories
Featured Politics

On Sovereignty

The Euros start this week, so I wanted to talk a bit about football, and what it means to the people who support it. Let me start with a sweeping and possibly controversial statement—I genuinely believe that one of humanity’s greatest achievements is the Football World Cup.

It’s a phenomenon that you can’t really put your finger on; for a month or so in the middle of the year, this electric atmosphere buzzes around everyday life as the whole world becomes enthralled in this high-skill, high-stakes stage of a game so simple that almost anyone could play it. The differences between countries are both intensified and nigh-on forgotten as our heroic foot-warriors jostle with, shoot at, dive from, leap over, and blatantly foul each other to the shouts, jumps and cries of the millions watching, proudly bearing the same jerseys as the ones plastered on the big screens. The competitive yet unifying energy of it is something genuinely like no other, and is an incredible feat. I think human progress is at its best when it brings us all together; when done right, that is exactly what the World Cup (and, by extension, the Euros) is about—appreciating and embracing diversity.

But why is this so different to normal club games? After all, it’s the same sport, just with different jerseys, new teams, and a fancy, if sometimes utterly irrational, location (I’m looking at you, Qatar). What changes in the World Cup, though, is this element of national identity; those odd labels that merely represent the place that you’re from, yet somehow have the ability to turn a game of football into a worldwide spectacle. The thing is, nationality isn’t just a passport, or a flag in your Instagram bio; much of the time it is an indicator that we use as the very definition of who we are. There is serious power to that. This sense of identity and belonging is what drives that World Cup fever, I think; rather than looking at any football game and thinking that we could probably do it ourselves, having these players represent our country, and by extension us, on this global stage makes us feel that we really are somehow involved in it—that we are more than mere spectators. This connection is uplifting, captivating and inspiring; international sports simply wouldn’t be the same without it.

Fans at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Moscow, July 2018.

The extent that nationality matters to people bleeds pretty heavily into many aspects of life; from sports to immigrant communities down to the very lines along which our country’s borders are drawn. It’s more or less this last aspect that I want to focus on—nationality, and its importance, is something that I think is blindingly obvious yet not appreciated nearly enough in political conversation. Ultimately, it holds a compelling power over people that, when properly harnessed, is almost impossible to convince them away from. This has the power to turn politics from a rational debate to an all-out clash of ideology and identity, with the power to cause war, break apart countries, or both. This has been specifically evident in the UK, with the division of Ireland some hundred years ago and the now hot-button topic of Scottish independence. Nationality plays a central role, I think, in why Scotland wants to be independent in the first place, and why the UK government’s attempts to get rid of the debate won’t work.

People who know me will know full well that I never stop going on about being Scottish; my dad’s family is originally from here, and my parents met in Edinburgh (I qualify for SAAS, alright?). But despite how much I jokingly go on about it, I really am Scottish in name only; my dad’s job has meant I have never actually lived here, and I grew up in the South of England, far away from even the faintest whisper of bagpipes or a trace of Haggis on supermarket shelves. What this distance means is that while I’m “Scottish”, I lack the Scottish experience; that intimate relationship with this country, gained from growing up and spending one’s life in it, that makes it an irreversible element of your identity. At the end of the day, no amount of ranting about education fees can provide that. It’s taken coming to university here, though, and actually interacting with people who do have this experience for me to realise its importance and how much I’m lying to myself when I call myself “Scottish”; if we’re honest, I don’t really have the full picture. I think that this means that I fail to properly understand the issue of Scottish independence, because like my Scottishness itself, I view it as much more of a title and less of a part of who I am; for someone truly Scottish, though, it is all about the latter.

Edinburgh, from Arthur’s Seat. 14th May, 2021.

I think that democratic politics is, in a way, a lot like football: people have this desire to see a reflection of themselves when looking at their representatives on the political stage. But much like the difference between club games and the World Cup, this reflection is not just about looking at government and thinking we could take over and make it better ourselves (which, let’s be honest, most of us do), but it’s about feeling that we are already doing so through the people we elect. And though that sense of involvement isn’t displayed as clearly as by those matching national uniforms, it’s every bit as important to the people’s participation in the process.
This is directly relevant to independence; ultimately, for a large part of the Scottish population, British politics is no longer a game they want to play. They don’t feel that the people they are watching truly represent them; Westminster for them is full of people who, much like me, claim to understand Scotland but have no real conception of the true Scottish experience. And though these people should be easily democratically replaced with better ones, Scotland is currently still a (relatively small) part of the UK—they can’t just vote in a whole new Westminster Parliament by themselves. Now, if the Scottish people were still fully invested in preserving the Union as a whole, this would be fine by them—but the point is that they’ve had enough. Scots have found that who they are no longer matches up with the rest of Britain; their left-wing, internationalist yet distinctly Scottish outlook is ever more starkly contrasted with England’s Brexit-fuelled separatist Tory government (even if a cabinet more similar to Scotland’s won a general election, though, I think that the damage has been done). The current system denies them the chance for that sovereignty that they so desperately want—breaking free of that is what independence is fundamentally about. I don’t think that such a dramatic ideological rift can be easily closed once it has formed, and the one between Scotland and England is widening at an alarming rate.

Those in power at Westminster, though, appear to have taken an interesting strategy to tackle the problem—namely, just ignoring it entirely. Obviously, Covid has thrown domestic politics into disarray, providing a convenient excuse to dance around the issue, but the Scottish elections in May especially has driven it right to the forefront; all the while, the UK government has barely spoken out on it at all. This refusal to directly address independence head-on has been going on for years now—from devolution, to the “once-in-a-lifetime vote” rhetoric from 2014’s referendum, to this year suggesting the SNP would require an outright majority at Holyrood before another referendum is even considered. When they do mention it, they proffer flimsy narratives in response of impracticality and economic instability that only seem to delay a vote rather than truly convincing anyone away from independence as a concept. But this childish plan of debate-dodging won’t last; issues of identity, especially those as deep-rooted as this, only grow stronger if not dealt with. If anything, it only proves how out of touch the English government truly is; if they don’t face this argument that has gripped Scottish politics for over a decade, how can they hope to truly represent it? It either shows a lack of understanding or a lack of democratic competence—honestly, I’m not sure which is worse.

Party leaders debate ahead of the May 2021 Scottish Parliamentary election. Edinburgh, 4th May, 2021.

A lot of this was playing on my mind last month as I voted for the first time ever in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, and watched the SNP narrowly fall short of that essential majority at Holyrood. Boris Johnson, yet again, will surely take this as a sign that he can continue to reject Nicola Sturgeon’s requests for another independence referendum. But Westminster has already been trying that for too long, and I can promise that it won’t work much longer. To be fair, much unlike the World Cup, I don’t think anybody wants a referendum every four years—by now, we’re all pretty tired of this worn-out debate. But what I’m arguing is that another vote is inevitable. People’s identity, and genuinely feeling that they have sovereignty over their own affairs, rather than being controlled by a government from a distant English metropolis who doesn’t understand them, matters. That feeling of fundamental disconnection is not one that any amount of delaying and sidelining can have any long-term effect on—the argument of Scottish independence is as prevalent as it is permanent, no matter how much Westminster may pray that it might disappear if they ignore it enough.

Much like the beautiful game, Politics’ value comes from the fact that anyone can get involved and make a difference on the pitch. Remove that appeal, though, and people stop wanting to play—it ends up becoming a bit more like polo than football. If the people don’t believe in Britain, British politics simply won’t work anymore; even if it means trading the money and security of a stadium for the familiarity and chaos of a playpark, people would rather play a game they have control of. Scotland may have decided that the UK simply doesn’t provide that; no matter how much you deny, delay, or argue against it, we may have come too far for that schism ever to be healed. After all, football has never been about how many trophies the team wins, but about their genuine connection with the fans; for that, I know which match I’ll be watching on Monday.

The Scotland Football team beat Serbia to qualify for the Euros for the first time in 23 years. Belgrade, 12th November, 2020.

References
Most of this one was done from my own experiences having spent a year (already!!) at university in Scotland. This article is a sort of tribute to that. I’d like to take this chance to thank everyone I’ve met along the way; I’ve learnt a lot, not just about Scottish independence, from the people I’ve met and the interactions I’ve had.
However, I picked up George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism for £1 from Lighthouse lately, which was incredibly interesting and quite influential towards my writing of this piece (even if he takes a very different view on Nationalism and even sports throughout). You can pick it up in-store or from here (for a quid):
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9780241339565

Image references (in order of use):
https://www.mos.ru/en/news/item/58750073/
Taken and owned by me
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56986718
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54853402

Categories
Featured Politics

On Equality

Almost one year ago, a 46-year old man walked into a store in Minneapolis and, while attempting to pay, was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill. The police were called, and the man was arrested; 8 minutes and 46 seconds later, a full two minutes after he had become unresponsive, he was dead. Last week, the person who was kneeling on his neck faced trial.

Meanwhile, the UK has been ripped apart by the fallout from the release of the Sewell report on racial disparity; in case you (somehow) missed it, it controversially concluded that “we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”. To many, this was an affirmation of what they’d believed for a long time; that structural racial discrimination in the UK no longer exists, and that those who claim it does are selfishly inventing an issue where one doesn’t exist. To me, though, this report was the most direct possible highlight of everything that I think people fail to understand about the structural and institutional racism that pervades our lives.

Contrary to the investigation’s suggestions, I believe that in the West, racial equality is a myth—structural racism penetrates deep into our society and continues to have huge effects today, regardless of how far we’ve come in alleviating it. This piece is my attempt to back up that idea (from the point of view of a white guy who has benefited from the exact systems it outlines).

Tony Sewell, chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. London, April 1st, 2021.

Institutional racism is a deeply multifaceted issue, and getting into its full extent would take somebody who knows a lot more than me a lot more time than just one article. So, in the interest of brevity and providing an example of where the report goes wrong, let’s talk about one issue the investigation brings up: education and success.

Over summer, a friend of mine recommended a book to me called “Outliers”, by Malcolm Gladwell; it’s a book that aims to explore the factors behind successful people, well, becoming successful. I really recommend reading it, but I’ll save you the time by cutting to its main finding: that success is about opportunity. More specifically, the only way that anybody ends up good at anything is by getting the opportunity to practice and become good at it. Across the book, Gladwell uses examples from Canadian ice hockey players to Bill Gates himself to show that the success of all of them was not determined by talent, but the opportunities they were provided from a young age. As he states in the conclusion to the book, success is “is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky”. The truth is that we don’t live in an egalitarian society; life is made incredibly easy for some (myself included) and incredibly difficult for others based on factors over which they have absolutely no control. This is a principle that I think can be applied across the human experience—the truth is, many of the things that you’ll be able to achieve are predetermined long before the day you are born.

Most of the people who maintain the idea that racial inequalities do not exist seem to parrot the exact same alternative narrative—that success is solely a result of hard work, and that if anyone works hard enough, their dreams are guaranteed. They laud figures such as Denzel Washington, who preaches that “hard work, works”*. They then extrapolate this to suggest that just because one person from a particular background can make it out and achieve amazing things, so can every single person from that background—and, according to them, those who fail to “make it” do so because they simply aren’t working hard enough.

  • Malcolm Gladwell gives a speech at an OZY Fest in Central Park. New York, NY, July 23rd, 2016.
  • Denzel Washington gives the Dillard University graduation commencement speech. New Orleans, LA, May 9th, 2015.

Listen: in a lot of ways, this isn’t incorrect. Success definitively requires hard work; nobody with any number of ideal opportunities is going to get anywhere without putting pretty significant effort in. But how much work you actually have to put in, and how conducive that work is going to be to actual achievement, varies heavily depending on your individual situation. To harness that hard work, you need the right opportunities—who gets which opportunities, then, depends majorly on your background. It is true that in today’s UK, you’d be lying if you suggested that it were absolutely impossible for someone to do anything based upon their ethnicity (though we’re still waiting on a non-white Prime Minster; we’ll get there.) But think of it like a running race, in which some contestants start 50 metres ahead while others start behind, with hurdles and obstacles in their way—those who start behind could win, say, if those in front walk really slowly, but it’s going to be tough work. No matter how much you grind, life is still more or less a game of luck—succeeding isn’t guaranteed. And what is important is that for a middle-class white kid like me, the amount of better-quality advantages you receive in life (which you can harness to eventually become successful) is going to be so much more than the average kid from an ethnic minority background**—we start out in front, and the course is much more clear. For others, the opportunities they receive are more likely to be fewer and further between; this means they can still do well, sure, but the odds are much more heavily stacked against them.

“But isn’t all of this more or less determined by class, not race?”, you might, pretty fairly, ask. Class definitely comes into it; indeed, regardless of race, the more money you have, the better your schooling, tech, extracurricular help, and even basic food provision can afford to be. Indeed, I reckon that most of the differences that I’ve outlined above can be put down to variation in class, not race (though other more subtle racial ones definitely do exist). But even if you ignore the other factors that affect education and futures and assume (pretty tenuously) that disparities in eventual affluence are totally explained by your socioeconomic position growing up, the blaring issue still stands that race is not accurately represented across classes. In the UK, white British people are easily the least likely ethnic group of all to be in the poorest income brackets, while the most likely to be in the richest:

UK Income distribution by ethnicity (after housing costs), April 2016-March 2019. Source: UK Government https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs

People of colour are far more likely to be in those lower income brackets, receiving worse opportunities and therefore being set up to do less well than their white counterparts**. White people are more likely to live in richer areas with better schools (or just be able to pay for better schools), to have affluent parents with powerful contacts, and to get tutoring, internships, extracurricular funding, summer schools, textbooks, and everything in between. This social, economic and cultural safety net consists of the exact advantages that Gladwell is on about (and many of the ones that I have benefited from myself)—sure, you can be absolutely fine without them, but you’re going to need a hell of a lot of luck. I think that many people fail to recognise this key difference between the possibility and probability of success; just because we could, in theory, all achieve something, doesn’t make us all equally likely of being able to achieve it, and doesn’t make it fair (think back to my running race analogy from before).

Being poorer, as ethnic minorities are more likely to be, doesn’t make success impossible, just as being rich doesn’t guarantee it; we’ve all heard stories of rags to riches and spectacular falls from grace. But just because one person bucks the trend created by this disparity doesn’t mean that all of them can—the truth is, most of them don’t. And as the gaps between socioeconomic classes increase due to this biased system (which they definitively are; inequality is not getting any lesser in the UK), so do the gaps between races as disadvantaged people fight harder to get less far. This is just one single, very focused example of how our society is ruthlessly rigged against ethnic minorities; I haven’t even touched on other broad issues like policing, health, or even employment (though the latter is very linked to what I have explored). Nor have I gotten into how discrimination expresses itself within classes and schools, through indirect biases such as how students of ethnic minority backgrounds can be hit with disproportionate rates of disciplinary punishment—these are incredibly pressing issues that the government’s “landmark” investigation fails to properly investigate.

For its part, the Sewell report acknowledges the issues that affect educational achievement, including parental income levels and education, geography, and family structure, while asserting that socioeconomic status by far correlates the most strongly with attainment. I more or less agree with this breakdown of the issue; what the report then suggests to solve this, though, is simply the improvement of early-age state schooling. I think that this could definitely make up a lot of ground, but at the end of the day equalising your first few years of school simply isn’t enough to deal with structural societal inequalities. This solution only addresses what happens within the classroom, and ignores the fact that most of the difference expresses itself without, through background, extra support, etc. It also doesn’t get into the massive advantage that mostly-white private schools provide.

They’ve pretty much admitted that the root of the problem is socioeconomic status, and the misrepresentation of races in this respect. So, why aren’t we dealing with that? Why are we focusing on early-age education while upholding this inadequate hierarchy when we could be working to change that system as a whole? This rationale is more or less, I think, reflected across the entire report; though in many cases, it identifies the problems we’re facing with surprising lucidity, its recommendations of solutions repeatedly fall short of what is necessary. The thing is, until we start addressing the deep racial disparities that are actually behind all of the issues we’re debating, those issues will never really go away. Many hoped that the Sewell report would start addressing that by actually beginning to confront these problems; I, for one, was incredibly disappointed to see that it didn’t.

Students at Eton College. Eton, Windsor, February 7th, 2012.

For me, the death of George Floyd was a wake-up call to facing issues that, as a privileged white kid, I had never been privy to in the past—more than anything, it was a reminder of just how different others’ lives are to mine, and just how much I have left to learn and to understand. That’s what I’ve spent the last year attempting to do, and I’m still trying. I’m nowhere near fully getting it now (and I never will be), but I know that I’m a lot closer than I was. What worries me, though, is that there are still so many people who don’t try: who are happy to be complacent and deny just how rigged our society is, to pretend that the reason that individuals pass or fail, work the trading floor or the streets, and receive a warning or a knee to the neck is because of their own faults, and not because of a system that is structurally stacked against them.

Though the conviction of Floyd’s murderer might bring his family peace, it won’t truly bring him justice; he won’t receive that until we finally create a world in which no innocent person like him dies in the first place. What pains me is that with the way things seem right now, that reality is still a long way off.

A memorial pays its respects to George Floyd, one week after his murder at the hands of a police officer. Minneapolis, MN, May 31st, 2020.


* I don’t at all think that Denzel doesn’t understand the issue, but I think that he is often misquoted and his ideas bent to fit a certain agenda.

** I am grouping all ethnic minorities together here as they are all at a disadvantage, but I want to make it clear that the difficulties that ethnic groups face are by no means homogenous and should not be unnecessarily generalised. Every individual’s, and every group’s, experience is complex and unique and should be treated entirely as such.

References
A lot of this one was again fuelled by my own thought, along with hours of conversations on the issue with people in-person and over the internet; this piece is my best attempt to put my point of view on it forwards in the most comprehensive way possible. This is the article I wish I could have read aged sixteen (when I really didn’t get it at all).
However, here are a couple books I’ve read that really influenced my thinking here (from Edinburgh-based independent bookstores, of course):
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/malcolm-gladwell/outliers/9780141036250/
(This is also a good criticism of Gladwell’s writing that is important to bear in mind: https://medium.com/@tomnew/how-malcolm-gladwell-writes-12960d83575c)
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (a really important read even if you disagree with me and everything this book stands for, as it explains this side of the argument really well):
https://lighthousebookshop.com/products/9781408870587?_pos=1&_sid=7ce713792&_ss=r
I’ll also repost the UK Government statistics page from which I took the graph above:
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs

Image sources (in order of use):
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anger-slave-claims-race-review-bame-equality-wlpsk6hgv
https://medium.com/@tomnew/how-malcolm-gladwell-writes-12960d83575c
https://www.fearlessmotivation.com/2018/09/23/denzel-washington-speech/
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-poshest-school-eton-paying-147911
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadjasayej/2020/06/04/the-story-behind-the-mural-at-the-george-floyd-memorial/?sh=1ed3976827f1
None of these images are owned by me, and I make no financial gain from their use. All credit goes to their original owners.