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?
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.
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?
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?
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
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:
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.
Abraham Lincoln famously quipped that “A House divided against itself, cannot stand”. Though these words were addressed to an 1800s America on the brink of Civil War, their message is applicable all across history: a timeless reminder that fundamental differences between allies can destroy even the most valiant institutions and movements from within.
A poignant example of this is the Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936 through until 1939, ending just as the rest of Europe erupted into chaos with the outbreak of World War II. Spain, since the exile of its king in 1931, had become a democratic republic: it championed values such as suffrage, divorce, gender equality, and freedom of religion, all of which were controversially progressive issues for a country that even today is still deeply devoted to its traditional Catholic roots. Even these five years, then, were plagued by bitter political battles between the progressive left and the traditionalist right, as well as spats within each camp between those in support of republic and people wanting to tear it down, whether that be Christian monarchists or radical anarchists. This period of tension, subterfuge and backstabbing eventually concluded with the army’s right-wing generals launching an invasion of southern Spain, plunging the country into a Civil War.
The lines of this war were quickly and decisively drawn. There were “Nationalists”, people in support of the rebels’ leader, General Francisco Franco, and his fascist invading forces, and “Republicans”, which were pretty much everyone else: an alliance of everyone from moderates who simply preferred democracy to fascism, to socialists, to all-out anarchists, who just hated Franco more than they disliked the moderate Republic. While this uneasy alliance, borne out of hatred of their shared enemy, lasted about a year, by 1937 in-fighting began: extremists and moderates began to attack each other in the infamous “May days”, leaving the entire alliance vulnerable to the more unified, aggressive and focused Nationalist forces, who took advantage of the chaos to gain the upper hand in the war. The Republicans never recovered, and lost their stronghold of Madrid in March 1939, letting in nearly forty years of brutal dictatorship.
Francisco Franco celebrates his victory in the Spanish Civil War. Madrid, March 28th, 1939.
I think there are important lessons we can learn from this example, many of which are particularly relevant in today’s US. The truth is, like the (Spanish) Republicans, the current American Democratic party is an incredibly unlikely alliance: for the past 4 years, it has shown surprising cohesion as the “anything but Donald Trump” wing of the American political spectrum. Trump himself, on the other hand, is no match for Franco’s extremism and brutality—nonetheless, his recent denial of the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election only reinforces his long-standing opposition to democracy if it does not work in his favour, much like the 1930s Spanish right wing. And while, like in Spain, this shared enemy of democracy may temporarily unite two disparate viewpoints to oppose it, I think that the party, and President Joe Biden at the head of it, are going to face the mounting challenge of keeping the organisation together as time drags on.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden celebrate their victory in the 2020 US Presidential Election. Wilmington, Delaware, November 7th, 2020.
Over 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden: more than in any other election in the nation’s history. This, in itself, is a staggering figure which only highlights the importance of last year’s election. In the world’s most diverse nation, this group obviously consisted of a wide range of demographics: people of all ages, genders, races and backgrounds stepped up to vote, many for the first time. The victory they achieved was massive both in terms of sheer numbers and significance, and pushed Biden over his first hurdle to become the 46th President of the US. However, it only represented the first of his many challenges: more than anything now, it emphasises the weight of the unique hopes of those millions of individuals, all of which now rest on his shoulders.
Biden has already taken further steps by winning a majority in the US Senate. Unlike the UK, where the Prime Minister is simply appointed by the biggest party in Parliament, which is elected at once, America has separate elections for both the Senate and the House (think of these as almost like the House of Commons and the House of Lords, but both have important powers) as well as an entirely different one for the President, which is what we saw in November. While the approval of all three is needed to pass major legislation, it is possible for a President to have control of only one of these or even to have neither, as Obama faced later on in his Presidency—this means their opponents can stop almost anything they do. The good news is that while the world was watching Trump-supporting extremists storm the Capitol a week ago, the Democrats quietly won two Senate seats back from Republicans in special elections in Georgia, securing (barely) a majority for Biden when he is inaugurated on top of his control of the House; this means the President will actually be able to effectively pass laws through the Houses without the Republicans entirely blocking everything.
Joe Biden campaigning with Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two recently-elected Senators from Georgia. Atlanta, January 4th, 2021.
However, the battle nowhere near done—the new President still faces the crucial issue of keeping his party together, on top of running a whole country, down the line. Even after the races in Georgia, the Senate will be perfectly split 50-50 (with the Vice-President having the deciding vote): if even one Democrat decides to vote against him, he won’t be able to pass anything into law. In his new autobiography, “A Promised Land” (which I really recommend if you want to learn about American politics; it’s teaching me a lot), Barack Obama highlights the difficulties of this situation. The knife-edge majority grants every Democratic Senator a huge amount of bargaining power, allowing them to force any law Biden tries to pass to change, stopping it in its tracks by voting against it if he doesn’t listen to their demands. This presented huge issues for Obama who, even though he had a bigger majority than Biden does now, had to bend over backwards to ridiculous personal requests in order to pass anything at all, taking huge shortcuts such as extra billion-dollar projects in Louisiana to deliver his landmark healthcare bill, for example. The new President will face all of the same issues that Obama did: even so, I think that the fallout from having to concede to these demands may be greater than ever, effectively threatening to divide the party in two.
Americans gather around a radio at the Lincoln Memorial to listen as Barack Obama wins his first Presidential election (Obama remarks in “A Promised Land” that this is his favourite image from the night). Washington, D.C., November 4th, 2008.
The Democratic Party is split between two blocs: “moderates”, who are less harsh right-wingers looking to keep continuity in the US (think UK Tories but mixed with Lib Dems), and “progressives”, who push for greater government investment and change (more like Labour). This important rift, while having been swept under the rug for years in order to deal with Trump, is once again beginning to rear its head now that the Democrats once again have control of government. Biden and his future Vice-President, Kamala Harris, mostly fall into the former camp, while figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are more prominent leaders of the latter. Progressives, though, were instrumental in securing Biden’s win—led by Bernie after his defeat and young campaigners on social media, they began a mighty push to “settle for Biden”, throwing their support behind him solely in order to kick out Trump—Biden, too, rose to their demands, for example on cancelling student loan debt, knowing that he had to count on their support to win. And, he has: but now that aim has been achieved, the atmosphere amongst progressives is beginning to change from support to suspicion. Biden’s cabinet nominations are showing many more play-it-safe moderate figures than progressive torchbearers, causing many voters to be disappointed, indicating that there may already be a marked difference between Biden’s agenda and that which many progressives, both voters and politicians, were hoping for. The cracks, then, may already be beginning to show.
What does any of this mean? I am worried that like in 1930s Spain, the differences between the Democrats could spell disaster for them. The fact that any of the fifty Democratic senators could single-handedly stop a law from passing will mean that any of them could make pretty much any request they wanted: but what happens when a moderate makes a demand that progressives don’t like? Or vice versa? Such arguments are bound to happen, and I think they may well tear the party apart, causing either half to entirely veto legislation made by their own official allies. Meanwhile, the Republicans will surely be waiting on the sidelines, spying weaknesses to exploit during future elections in 2022 and 2024. If the Democrats can’t reconcile their differences, I don’t see their grip on power lasting long.
Mark Twain, Lincoln’s contemporary, told us that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. The Spanish Civil War was fought over 80 years ago and in entirely different circumstances, but the principles at stake were mostly the same as in modern America: those who are driven to defend democracy pushing back those who are desperate to bend it to their will. And while we might think that if anywhere, democracy is safe in the Land of the Free, the 6th of January taught us that we should take nothing for granted (especially when the police and even the President support the aggressors). Joe Biden may yet face some of the toughest challenges of any President in recent memory: we will all be counting on him to overcome them.
Rioters storm the US Government at Capitol Hill in protest of the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. Washington, D.C., January 6th, 2021.
Here’s the second archive piece from this summer. I wrote this one with my friend Seb Kingsberry for our school magazine in response to the BLM movement after the killing of George Floyd. Both of us are white, and pretty privileged ourselves, but we couldn’t just sit back without using our position for something; this piece is written from our perspective, about how the movement affects us and the people around us and what we can do to create change. Black Lives Matter, today and forever; don’t stop fighting until the people who aren’t recognising that are stamped out. –AB
Many of us in the King’s community, pupils and adults alike, will look at the issues raised by the murder of George Floyd and think that they don’t apply to us. We go to a school in a Somerset town, where minorities and people of colour are few and far between, we are far removed from the tales of police brutality that we hear of in the cities of the UK and America. And besides, we’re not racist; incidents of abuse to people due to the colour of their skin are incredibly rare and, once they’re dealt with, they are quickly forgotten, and that’s enough, isn’t it?
More than anything, the past months have opened our eyes to the fact that it’s not.
As a community and as a country, most of us don’t understand how privileged we really are. We’re lucky to live in the world that we do, seemingly disconnected from the issues that encapsulate the protests that we are mere bystanders to. The truth is that those of us who are white benefit from that simple fact; the colour of our skin. Because we’re white, we don’t have to grapple with belonging to a community where everyone looks different to us. Because we’re white, we don’t have to worry that someone will judge us on our skin colour before they even meet us. Because we’re white, we don’t have to feel that intangible fear that so many feel every time they look at a police car; that they will be arrested, attacked, or even killed solely because of their appearance. Something that we must consider is that our lives have been made easier because we live in a world designed for people like us. And it’s not that our lives haven’t been hard, or that all lives don’t matter; nobody has ever claimed that. But the fact that people who are black or brown have to go through things that we don’t is an injustice that we have to fight; during this challenging time we need to use our privileged position to do something about it.
One person alone cannot stop police brutality, or undo the racist sins of history. But what we can do is take small steps, by ourselves, to start being anti-racist, and building a solution to the problem.
The first step is education. This issue is not going to fix itself until we learn more about it; we need to open ourselves up and listening to the voices of people of colour, whether that be through talking to our friends about the difficulties they face or reading articles and books that deal with historical and current issues of racism. Something many of us lack at King’s is exposure to, and awareness of, these struggles; nothing will change until we understand how our privilege has affected us and how others’ lives are made harder due to their ethnicities. It doesn’t take long to read one article a day, however an essential start to solving this is first understanding what we’re dealing with.
The next part is much harder, but is even more important; it involves challenging ourselves, and those around us. We live in a culture where talking about racism has become avoided and frowned upon, often for fear of somehow saying something wrong. In this culture, things will not change. Making mistakes, regretting something and atoning for it, is just how we grow as people, and it’s normal. If you find information about historic racism, or police brutality, or BAME education, that makes you change your mind, have the maturity to change it; stubbornness and close-mindedness get us nowhere. And if your friends, or even your family, make genuinely racist comments, have the courage to challenge them. Question why they believe what they believe; though it may be difficult in the moment, people won’t change if they don’t realise they’re wrong. Maybe they won’t back down, but in responding you’re showing them that their views aren’t accepted, around you or anyone else. But please don’t turn family dinner into a shouting match; approach it in a calm and measured way, and just have a discussion about it.
It is evident that we could benefit from greater open-mindedness and diversity at King’s; in our public-school world, it is all too easy to ignore these problems, but now is the time to step up and change that. In the past, we haven’t done enough to be anti-racist; but what matters now is that we try to change the future and build a community, and a world, where the colour of our skin does not decide who we are. Doing that won’t be easy or fast, and it was never going to be; but after some time and effort we will emerge as a more understanding, empathetic and united community. –24/06/20
Several weeks ago, in mid-July, I was standing in Dam square in Amsterdam. It’s a renowned centre of activism and multiculturalism in the area; on that day, I was sat listening to a busker playing a Turkish clarinet and watching stands that ranged all the way from an online summit on Iran to a single person holding up a sign against systemic racism as an eclectic mix of people of all ethnicities and nationalities passed through. As I took in the scene, I was approached by a Chinese man who, in broken English, explained to me that he was collecting signatures for a petition over the CCP’s treatment of the Falun Dafa movement. As he explained his story to me, I was struck by the striking similarities between his situation and ones I have seen across social media and even in history class; specifically, the recent persecution of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang. Their plight has been reported since 2018 and is gaining a resurgence across the news and social media, but relentlessly continues all the same. It dawned on me then that we have seen their exact story before with Falun Dafa, and if authoritarianism continues to exist unchallenged, we will doubtless see it again.
3pm in Dam Square. Amsterdam, 17th July, 2020.
Let’s start at the beginning; specifically, the mid-1990s, where a new form of spiritual practice, known as Falun Dafa or Falun Gong, is taking hold of China. Its founder, Li Hongzi, promotes a set of meditations and spiritual exercises designed to bring his followers the values of “truthfulness, compassion, [and] forbearance” which are central to the movement. It is, ultimately, about peace and self-discovery**(see edit at end); however, as it grows, China’s Communist Party, the CCP, seeks to control it, initially by attempting to establish Party branches within Falun Gong groups. When the groups refuse this, the CCP bans the publication of Falun Gong books in July 1996. Still, the movement grows; by 1999, some estimates pin 70 million people as practicing it, 18% of the population. Then, in July, the crackdowns begin; within a week of the CCP beginning nationwide arrests, some 50,000 Falun Gong practitioners are detained by the authorities. Hongzi flees for the US. Those who are captured are sent to secret concentration camps, where they are tortured, beaten, and forced to renounce their beliefs, calling Falun Gong an “evil cult” and expressing utter loyalty to the CCP. For those that succumb to the abuse, there are reports of their organs being harvested by the government. One practitioner, James Ouyang, tells the Washington Post in 2001 that he was abused by police for nine days straight before he denounced the movement and was allowed to leave. The West, shocked, condemns China’s actions to no avail; the systematic abuse carries on regardless.
1. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners gather for their daily meditation. Liaoning Province, 1990s. 2. The first 4.25 protest against Falun Gong Persecution. Beijing, 4th April, 1999. 3. A lawyer is arrested for defending the rights of Falun Gong practitioners. Shandong Province, 2nd July, 2009.
Sound familiar? It should. The exact same strategy is being used today against the Uighurs. The Uighurs are an 11-million-strong ethnic population from Xinjiang in Northwest China who bear close links to central Asian nations and, majoratively, practice Islam. In the past, the Uighurs have intermittently expressed wishes for independence from a China which is different to them ethnically, religiously, and ideologically; nonetheless, separatist rumblings have been silent for years. Since 2018, there have been reports of many Uighurs mysteriously vanishing, reportedly having been sent to hastily built and rapidly expanded “re-education” camps, where, the CCP asserts, they are merely trained in artistry, poetry and music. Family members from outside of China claim that they have had no contact with these relatives, some of whom have apparently disappeared off the face of the earth. Though China studiously denies any maltreatment in these camps, stories relayed anonymously by survivors, terrified for their lives, show that through systematic torture, pressuring and brainwashing, inmates are forced to curse religion and renounce the Qur’an while singing songs praising the CCP, and chants of “Long Live Xi Jinping!”. Yet again, reports have escaped of the organ harvesting of those who die. Despite constant coverage since 2018 and international condemnation, Communist Party denial remains intact while these prison camps continue to expand. The relentless campaign to remove Islam from China shows no signs of slowing down; and, what is more, its development shows profound resemblance to what happened to the Falun Gong movement in the 1990s.
First of all, why? Why go to such extremes, even against international pressure, to crush what are mostly peaceful religious movements? The answer is, to put it simply, because the CCP are scared. Authoritarian regimes thrive on a sort of fanaticism; much like religions do, they aim to invade and control the daily lives of their followers, and need their utter devotion to effectively function. Religion, in any form, poses a direct threat to this aim; it has the potential to replace this devotion to the ruling party with another, rival one, freeing those who follow it from the direct control of the regime, and even uniting them against it. We’ve seen it all before; Adolf Hitler himself spent years embroiled in a bitter fight with the Catholic Church, which refused to come under his control. No matter how hard he tried, whether through replacing priests or trying to swap pictures of Jesus for those of him in churches, he was emphatically rebuffed; and leaders of the Church, ever-popular amongst the people, were untouchable even to the SS lest they risk an all-out rebellion. Hitler failed to defeat religion, and the Church led resistance against him throughout the war, undermining his grip over the people.
Nazi stormtroopers holding propaganda in front of a church. Berlin, July 23rd, 1933.
The CCP refuses to make the same mistake; it wants its local headquarters to be its people’s Church, and Chairman Xi Jinping to be their God. If Falun Gong, or Islam, or whatever comes next, no matter how peaceful it is, stands in the way of that by setting forward an ulterior ideology, of course the Chinese government will stop at nothing to take it down—it wants the people’s devotion to itself, and it alone. And why shouldn’t they stamp it out; after all, they got away with it last time. Post-1999, the once-surging Falun Gong movement melted into the shadows, its memory erased from the Chinese people’s minds, and its followers banished, with little left to do but try to drum up support in places such as Dam Square for a cause that is long lost. If nothing changes, we are cursing the Uighurs to the same fate.
But finally, will anything change? Can it? The depressing and slightly morbid answer is, unfortunately, probably not. Recently, I have seen waves of support across Instagram for the Uighurs; stories seem awash with thousands of posts indicating the grim reality of the concentration camps and organ harvesting. Our politicians aren’t unaware, either; Dominic Raab, Marco Rubio and a whole host of others have officially condemned China’s actions. All of this seems impressive; however, do China care about Instagram stories, or foreign “condemnation”, or tiny petitions signed by tourists in a square in Amsterdam? No. Not at all. Western social media is banned in China, after all, and China’s historic hatred of foreign intervention in its affairs has only further hardened it against listening to any recommendations the West might make to it on how it chooses to treat its people. In an epitomising example of this in late July, the Chinese ambassador to the UK blatantly denied all misconduct even when faced with tapes of prison camps on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show; he, like the government he serves, cares precious little for what we think, so long as we keep buying their exports and using their products. If we really wanted to try to stop any of this, we would have to engage with China in a unified and direct way, and hit them where it hurts. I’m talking trade embargoes, or even further. A situation like this could even offer opportunity for an alliance between the defenders of human rights in the West and Islamic countries in the East to fight this injustice, together; if enough countries banded up, we could send out a threat that China simply couldn’t afford to ignore. But in a world fraught with xenophobia, mutual distrust and outright war between the West and Muslim nations, could such an unlikely unification ever be pulled off? And is Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump, really going to put their compromised political status and their already-crippled economies on the line in a war against China over a group of persecuted Muslims, half the world away? Perhaps, taking action would only serve to divide us just as much as our lack of it defines us.
China’s ambassador to the UK rebukes reporters, calling alleged prison camps “fake news”. London, 25th November, 2019.
We failed to properly react to Falun Gong 20 years ago. Today, the Uighur crisis is showing us that we clearly haven’t learnt our lesson. And mark my words: if we don’t learn it this time, the next will play out the exact same way. The harsh reality is that as long as authoritarian regimes like the CCP continue to exist, systematic killings like that of the Uighurs will occur. And with the way things are, none of that is showing signs of changing anytime soon.
Street protests commemorate 20 years since the CCP began arrests of Falun Gong members. San Francisco, July 22nd, 2019.
EDIT Since writing this, a few people have engaged in conversation with me about Falun Gong propaganda and cultism; after doing a bit of research, it’s come to my attention that these pretty heavily and unfairly influenced my writing process and resources used for this article. I knew that Li Hongzi had gone progressively more insane over the years, but had no idea about the blatant extremism of the movement, which has more or less evolved into a cult. This, of course, doesn’t at all excuse the CCP’s abuse of Falun Gong, which remains abhorrent; however, the movement’s treatment equally doesn’t venerate it from all criticism, which it undoubtedly deserves. Below are some resources on the darker side of Falun Gong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JaPzJKycxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAwsU6YIDHQ&t=23s https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121
References I read a lot for this one, and there’s a lot of information out there on it. Nonetheless, here are the resources that helped me the most in writing this piece:
The situation in Hong Kong is as serious as it is difficult. Millions of protesters line the streets and fill the universities, in outcry against the Chinese dictatorship. Their demands are, for the most part, reasonable; they want withdrawal of Carrie Lam’s proposed extradition bill, which would have Hong Kong prisoners sent to China at Beijing’s request, an independent investigation into the reported police brutality, involving outright beatings, gassings and alleged gang-rape of unarmed innocents and, most essentially yet controversially, real democracy and free elections. For some, they will stop at nothing until this vital request is fulfilled.
There have been many comparisons, notably by leading activist Joshua Wong in his visit to Germany, that Hong Kong is “the new Berlin” of my generation’s Cold War. The problems faced are, indeed, similar; a pro-democracy movement protesting the oppression of the totalitarian dictatorship it is forced to live under, and that dictatorship attempting to crush it into the ground. Hong Kong has a clear parallel with Berlin in that it is the semi-free link between China’s iron firewall and the outside world; this, combined with its slowly eroding “one country, two systems” status, fuels revolutionary attitudes in a strikingly similar fashion to how it did in Berlin. Perhaps, as happened 30 years ago, these protesters could start a nationwide movement to free China from the grips of its communist rulers; yet, the likelihood of this outcome seems to lessen and lessen with every Chinese response.
Joshua Wong
The protesters in Berlin were, undoubtedly, lucky; rather than being faced with the consequences of defiance, they were met with support from the Russian dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev; he went on to not only liberate Berlin but all of Eastern Europe from the clutches of the USSR and its puppets. But Xi Jinping is no Gorbachev, and Hong Kong no Berlin. In Europe, communism was all but finished; despite their planning, coordination and cooperation, the Soviets had not truly rivalled the Western states economically, and though they used terror tactics, and propaganda, to fully permeate every part of their people’s lives, they still did not fully embrace communism. After 40 years, Gorbachev realised that communism had failed; when the uprisings began, he embraced them. In China, the exact opposite has happened; economic performance is unprecedented, and I have seen first-hand the unquestioned control that the CCP holds over the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. They, like those who dare oppose them, are unyielding in their demands.
Hong Kong is, I fear, much more like Belfast, where I lived as a child, than Berlin. Both the so-called liberators and rulers are growing in violence as tension rises and no side seems willing to give. The students filling the universities, crying for freedom from China, seem only too similar to the youths who founded the IRA in the 1970s and set out to deliver Northern Ireland from British control. I felt the echoes the of bitter, bloody street fighting that ensued whenever I visited the city, conscious to hide any sense of Englishness lest an impassioned Republican notice. The war in Ireland never truly ended, rather reached a bitter stalemate; the standard-bearers of the IRA continue their fight politically in the halls of Stormont, rather than violently in the streets that surround it. What I am sure of is that Hong Kong’s freedom fighters will receive no such opportunity, and, if they press too hard, that China’s retaliation will know no limits. If the ripples of a conflict such as the Troubles can still be felt in Belfast today, I fear for the escalation of its new sister.
Maybe Hong Kong is not Berlin or Belfast, but its own story entirely; it will certainly make for a significant tale and its inhabitants, those who tried to fight the most powerful regime in human history, made an example of—for better or for worse. Whether today’s protesters reach freedom as in Berlin, grind to a violent stalemate as in Belfast or meet another end entirely at the end of Xi Jinping’s wrath, their memory will separate a city, a nation and a planet for years to come.
Alex Baxter 