I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

A Brief History of Jihadism: The British South Asian Nexus

A few weeks ago I was asked to write a short piece by SOAS University of London, for the section of the Guardian website they use to promote the university's work and some of its ideas and thinkers.

This is my contribution, A Brief History of Jihadism: The British South Asian Nexus.

Education Not Segregation?

Today sees Labour party rallies across the country against the Conservative's declared intention to reintroduce grammar schools. Labour is campaigning under the slogan 'Education not Segregation'.

There is a case for separating children on the basis of ability, indeed some form of streaming has long been the norm within the comprehensive system. It certainly was when I was at school. If Labour want to debate that, all well and good. But today's campaign slogan is utterly disingenuous.

The Labour party does support segregated education - providing it is segregation on the basis of a parent's declared faith. That is what faith schools mean. And there are a lot more faith schools than grammar schools.

If You Financed Your PhD With A Career Development Loan.....

You need to check your paperwork, and speak to your bank.

Back in 2008, one of the ways I sought to finance my PhD was by taking out a career development loan. It was probably not a good decision - I had no face to face advice, and reliant only on what I could find online rather rushed the application. I applied for too small a sum, and did not really take in the fact you had to pay it back after three years - regardless of whether you were still studying or not.

Paying it off was grim - I spent most weekends and all summer in 2011 and 2012 doing security work at various sites across London and the south east. Studying had to wait. In a lot of ways though, I learned as much from that as I did from my own research - about how people act in crowds and groups, when violence starts, how big corporations work and do not work, and the impact of globalisation.
At times it was hard not to laugh out loud - working with a group of Pakistani 'students' from a G4S subcontractor, I casually mentioned that I was not only a mature student but worked at university. Near panic broke out in the ranks as their unofficial foreman began shouting to the others in Urdu - no doubt warning that their cover stories could fall apart if anyone spoke too much to me! Later I received the regular email from Sir Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, where he kept staff informed of his determined lobbying against the Home Secretary's restrictions on student visas. Sir Edward would never see the world that I had, and could not grasp the main reason such employees are low paid is the bottomless pool of workers (some pretending to be students, especially at language schools) entering the country daily. For them, the minimum wage is a fortune.

On Saturday morning I went downstairs to find a letter from my former bank, declaring they had wrongly charged interest on my career development loan, and incorrectly charged me on the occasions I failed to meet monthly payments. A cheque for a four figure sum was enclosed. In some ways I am very lucky - had the bank sent it to my old address, I would never have received it. In others I reflect on how much easier life would have been without the ball and chain of interest charges. I would certainly have finished my PhD sooner, and would be further down the career path I want to get too.

If you used a career development loan to help finance your PhD, do speak to your bank about the interest payments and any charges. You may be due a significant refund.

Back at Work Today?

No I am not.

My children's school has decided to take today and tomorrow as an INSET day. Conveniently (for them) they also closed for the Christmas break half a day early, at 1330 on Friday 18th December. That gave my wife and I the choice of taking an unpaid afternoon off work to collect and look after the children, or paying a childminder to do it. Thousands of other parents have that same choice.

I have no idea who schools are run for in England and Wales - the teachers, or the children. Let no one say it is for the parents.

Libraries Need........ Books

Once children were considered to be in poverty - be it absolute or cultural - if they had no access to books. But now, access to books is increasingly considered old fashioned or unnecessary, for both children and adults.

It is not cuts which have undermined or destroyed public libraries. Birmingham's new library cost an astonishing £189 million, a project of breathtaking ego and waste. Instead it is the faddish approach to knowledge and naivete towards new technology which have turned library after library into a pale shadow of their former selves.

An artists impression of Birmingham's brave new world of learning

Librarian Carol Honey had a superb letter in the i of 18 August 2015 which best described this reckless abandonment of book based learning:

As a librarian and frequent visitor to Birmingham, I looked forward to the opening of the new library with eager anticipation, but when I made my first (and only) visit I could have wept. At the entrance you are greeted by a large cafe, reception and shop - no hint of the type of building you are in. The signage is confused with floors described as 'Knowledge' or 'Discovery'. What is wrong with Fiction, Non-fiction or Reference?
Two huge neon-lit escalators to the first floor were full of schoolchildren chasing each other up and down and screaming loudly. I couldn't blame them, it looked like a shopping mall. When I eventually found the book stock, I was appalled at how poor it was. Disappointed doesn't begin to describe my feelings.

Carol Honey

The Manipulation of the News

When reporting on matters of race or racism, we cannot even rely on liberal elites to report basic matters of fact. 

Yesterday a 14 year old boy was jailed for 11 years for stabbing his teacher, Vincent Uzomah, in the stomach whilst he was teaching at a secondary school in Bradford. Mr Uzomah had told the boy off for playing with his mobile phone. Mr Uzomah, who is black, was racially abused by the boy, who is British of Pakistani heritage, during the incident. The lad later boasted about it on Facebook, receiving 69 'Likes' for his actions. 

Listening to the BBC radio 4 coverage of the sentencing yesterday evening, there was no mention of the attacker's ethnicity, although plenty of the fact that this was a racist attack. An approach which was continued in the BBC and Channel 4 news internet coverage. Many following such 'analysis' would simply have assumed this was another case of a white racist lashing out at someone from an ethnic minority. That impression would certainly have been absorbed by the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning. Here a discussion ensued between Laura Pidcock of anti-racist group Show Racism the Red Card and Sagheer Azfal, a supply teacher who reported he had experienced racism from pupils at secondary schools. 

Here, the Today Programme seemed to be attempting to bowl a googly from a fast bowler's run-up. If a black man is stabbed by a British-Pakistani racist, it seems a little strange to ask a British Asian to talk about their experiences of racism? Would a report on a black person stabbed by a white racist bring in the comments of a white teacher with negative experiences of some black children? I dare the BBC to try it........Whilst Laura Pidcock eagerly presented a series of familiar left complaints, for example about alleged racism in the media coverage of migrants, there was no attempt by anyone to comment on the elephant in the room - that poor old Mr Uzomah's attacker was not a white racist at all. 

In the media coverage I have seen in the past eighteen  hours, Helen Pidd, the rather impressive Northern editor of the Guardian, is one of the few journalists with the backbone to report the racist aspect of this case fully, both on social media and on the Guardian's website yesterday. I have asked both Show Racism the Red Card and the Today Programme if their comments this morning fully reflect the nature of this incident. I don't expect a reply.

For liberal elites - and BBC journalists and educational groups working in schools such as the government funded Show Racism the Red Card are textbook examples of liberal elites who form and shape opinion - cases like the stabbing of Vincent Uzomah are pre-determined. The problem is racism, and racism is about white people saying critical things about or doing nasty things to black people. If a case emerges that undermines this script, the details are subtly disguised so the expected impressions can still be digested by the general public. That is why we are not told the attacker's ethnic heritage. To reinforce wider political concerns, activists like Laura Pidcock are brought in to attach media coverage of benefit claimants and asylum seekers in Calais to a specific attack, and for additional absorption of the core message, an actual victim of white racism, Sagheer Azfal, used. 

And that, in one simple case, is how liberal elites manipulate the news. 

Critical Thinking Against Terrorism?

Back in March Jamie Bartlett of Demos wrote  a challenging article arguing that the best antidote to terrorist recruitment was encouraging people to think for themselves, and to think critically. 

There is much to be said for this approach, not least because it has the potential to undermine at source those joining and supporting groups such as Islamic State, and also the conspiratorial mind-set which ensures such groups flourish. I have five comments on Bartlett's article:

1. It is impossible to stop the spread of ideas, but political elites in the UK and certainly academia have broadly succeeded in restricting the ideas of the far-right.  In practice what Theresa May seeks to do now is extend to Islamist currents the restrictions fascists and those considered to be racist have experienced for decades.  The difference of course, and why she is facing such turbulence, is that Islamists have more sympathy among elites than the far-right. 

 2. Matthew Denith, who writes on conspiracy theory, has said the problem with conspiracy theorists is not what they think, but how they think. That is the territory Bartlett is moving into here, and it is an incredibly challenging area. Others have not realised how important it is.  

 3. Do terrorists from Timothy McVeigh to Al-Qaeda all say the same basic thing, as Bartlett argues? To an extent yes - they claim to be reluctant warriors, forced to pick up the gun by the now unprecedented machinations of X (insert appropriate rival) or more often in the case of religious terrorists, the requirements forced upon them by Y - be it the Bible, the Qur'an or any number of other religious texts. The claim that violence has been forced upon them by others should tell us how important grievance is, and how dangerous the current grievance culture in this society is.

Instead our politicians seem to be scared by the public display of grievance - the tolerance of the Conservative Party to Baroness Warsi's grievance mongering now borders on the reckless. I keep expecting them to detonate all the dirt they hold on her - they never do. 

 4. I have not seen any detailed research on the numbers of UK students and graduates in Syria/Iraq, and their academic backgrounds. Indeed both FOSIS (the Federation of Student Islamic Societies) and UK Universities declined to reply when I asked each how many university students are currently fighting in Iraq and Syria. My instinct would be that amongst those fighters there will be a lot more from technical backgrounds than Sociology students. Jason Burke has made the point about the number of technical students in Al-Qaeda and related groups - I have seen nothing to indicate IS will be any different. 

Might that indicate again that the problem is how people think, how they process information and consequently decide to act?

 5. In encouraging critical thinking, and in the process rejecting censoring and restricting ideas, we probably get closer to affirming 'British values' than Mrs May is. I do think Telegraph readers would benefited from that point if Bartlett had made it......

 

China Must Be Quaking In Its Boots

I know I should not take the 'Home' supplement of The Sunday Times too seriously, but Charlotte Vowden needs to be flayed through every high street in the country for this nonsense in a feature "Turning up the heat" on the economic prospects in Birmingham:

"Unemployment has blighted Birmingham - despite its four universities - so giving its young folk the best start in life is high on the agenda here. To tackle the problem, some schools such as Perry Beeches the Academy, in Great Barr, have added balti cooking lessons to the curriculum."

So there you have it. What was once one of our great industrial cities is addressing the problem of economic decline and unemployment by .............. doing cookery classes in some of its schools.

On this evidence, the emerging economic powerhouses of the east have little to fear from the UK.