Category Archives: media

Anti-Roma prejudice and an unlikely prediction

Posted on by symonhill

Come January, the right-wing media in the UK might have some explaining to do. The Daily Mail (and their friends in UKIP and the Tory Right) have been telling us that Britain will be flooded by immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, as the last restrictions on their immigration to the UK are lifted.

Some of the rhetoric gives the impression that you will barely be able to move in London, Dover or Skegness for the number of Romanians and Buglarians pouring off the boats.

I dare say that Nigel Farage and his friends will soon be brushing away the figures showing that Romanian and Bulgarian immigration is lower than predicted. Neither UKIP nor the Daily Mail let the truth get in the way of scaremongering.

Much of the coverage easily confuses “Roma” with “Romanian”. Last month, the Daily Star ran a front page attack on “Roma” immigration. It quoted the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, who has suggested that such immigration could lead to riots.

I find it hard to believe that such immigration could really reach the levels of Polish immigration a few years ago; the UK was not in the middle of an economic crisis in those days.

The Sun said recently that that Romanians and Bulgarians would come to Britain for its welfare state and “generous benefits”. This is even more unbelievable, given that to get here they will have to pass through countries with considerably more generous welfare states (notably Germany).

One of the reasons that might help to draw migrants to Britain is the fact that they are more likely to speak English than the languages of certain other European countries. Ironically, the global dominance of the English language is an indirect result both of US global power and of the general British unwillingness to learn languages. These are both things that tend to be defended by the same people who condemn immigration to the UK.

In the 1930s, the Daily Mail ran attacks on Jewish migrants “pouring” into Britain. They were fleeing the Nazis.

Today, racism and xenophobia are still alive and powerful in the UK. The BNP may be disorganised and the EDL disintegrating, but the Mail and the Sun always had far more power than both of them. UKIP are considered a respectable mainstream force, as their racism comes with suits and smiles.

Decades after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and other forms or racism continue to be powerful forces. The recent cases of children being snatched from Roma parents who don’t look like them shows crude racial bigotry hovering just below the surface of supposedly democratic state authorities.

I began this blog post on a train from London to Brussels. The journey took two hours, slightly shorter than the train trip from London to Manchester. To get on the train, I was required to walk through a metal detector and then display my passport. Why is this required for Brussels but not for Manchester or even the much longer journey to Scotland? Because of a series of historical accidents that divide people up into nations and nationalities.

Corporations can largely ignore these borders, moving money and employment wherever the mood – or the profit – takes them. The rest of us are confined by them, encouraged to define ourselves by them and to rate those of our nationality as being more worthy of life and work than those who live across an arbitrary border.

Lack of housing is blamed on migrants rather than on the failure of successive governments to build decent social housing and to stop people leaving houses empty. Low pay is attributed to migrants willing to work for less, rather than a lamentably low minimum wage.

It is common to blame our problems on those who seem different to us. I know that I can do this too. My prejudices are not acceptable either. The first step to overcoming prejudice, at a personal or social level, is acknowledging its existence.

Being British is part of my identity. So is the fact that I have a beard. These two aspects of my identity are of roughly equivalent importance to me. But I am constantly told that I must rate one of them as more important than anything else about me. Indeed, we are so accustomed to thinking in this way that we barely notice we are doing it.

When Jesus was asked “Who is my neighbour?”, he responded with a story about a man who showed love to a stranger despite racial, religious and cultural differences (commonly referred to as the “good Samaritan”). It’s time we recognised nationality and ethnicity for the arbitrary and trivial distinctions that they are.

Why I’m not cheering the Pilling Report

Posted on by symonhill

Two and a half years ago, I was undertaking a pilgrimage of repentance for my former homophobia when I received a phone call from Ruth Gledhill of the Times. The Church of England’s House of Bishops had just announced a two-year consultation process on homosexuality. Ruth wanted to know my view on it.

Now the consultation process has ended, resulting in the Pilling Report. It is full of language that says the church should be more welcoming alongside policies that say the opposite. I’m sorry to see some LGBT Christians welcoming it and have written a fuller response on the website of Queers for Jesus. Please click here to read it.

How is the Sun more progressive than the Independent?

Posted on by symonhill

Today is the first day on which I’ve been grateful that the Sun has far more readers than the Independent.

I was looking at the front pages of the newspapers in WH Smith’s and my heart began to sink as I saw the front of the Sun. At first glance, it seemed to involve a story about a mother’s whose child’s gender was disputed. I braced myself for an offensive story peddling prejudices against transgender people.

What I found was quite the opposite. The story concerned six-year-old George, who was brought up as a girl (called Georgia). At an early age, George had said “I’m a boy” and asked to be called George. His mother is respecting his decision and treating him as a boy. His twin sister remains a girl.

The Sun‘s report focused on the prejudice faced by George and his mother, Hayley, who has been accused of encouraging her child’s maleness for her own ends. She insists she neither encouraged nor discouraged it, but accepted George’s choice. The Sun is clearly in her favour, giving over a high percentage of the word count to her quotes and portraying the school authorities that disputed George’s gender in a poor light.

The article is not perfect. It could be a lot more helpful and clear about gender fluidity and there are some questionable statistics. But it’s great to see a paper with a history of prejudice, and with a massively high readership, making clear that gender is not obvious and can change.

Uplifted by the Sun‘s coverage, I moved along to look at the other front pages. I saw the Independent, the paper I buy most often and usually admire. This time, my heart really did sink.

“Scientists discover the difference between male and female brains” declared the paper’s headline. The standfirst that followed read, “Study reveals variation in hardwiring which may explain skills gap between women and men”.

This is the latest scientific study to “reveal” that men and women have different brains. Some of these studies have more credibility than others, although quite a few have been systematically discredited. However objective or nuanced the researchers’ intentions may (or may not) be, these studies all get picked up and celebrated by people who want an excuse for treating men and women differently and pretending that society is not to blame for stereotyping and sexism.

At the very least, the Independent should be acknowledging that this is an issue on which scientists are divided. A balanced article should surely quote someone who disagrees with the study and make clear why this is such a controversial issue. I am genuinely surprised that a paper of the Independent‘s quality and open-mindedness did not do this.

Today’s Sun gives us reason to celebrate how far we have come in challenging narrow and restrictive notions of gender. Today’s Independent is a reminder that we still have a great deal more to fight against.

Co-ops, cocaine and Christianity

Posted on by symonhill

As chairman of the Co-operative Bank, Paul Flowers shared responsibility for the decisions that led to a situation in which most of the bank is to be bought up by hedge funds. Last week, Paul Flowers was filmed buying cocaine.

Bafflingly, many people seem to regard the second offence as worse than the first one.

We can debate how much blame should be attached to Flowers for the effective destruction of the Co-op Bank (to be fair, many of the mistakes were made before he was appointed). But the massive changes at the Co-op will affect thousands if not millions of people – among them the employees facing job losses, the customers who will lose their ownership of the bank and potentially many more who will suffer if the bank weakens its ethical standards for investments.    

While I do not condone the use of cocaine, and I condemn the cocaine trade, Flowers’ drug purchase will hurt far fewer people (mainly himself) than the decisions he and his colleagues took about the Co-operative Bank.

The Mail on Sunday published the cocaine story two days ago. Later that day, the Methodist Church put out a press release saying that Flowers had been suspended from his role as a Methodist minister pending investigation. No such action was taken when the Co-op Bank went down the pan. Indeed, I don’t think there was even an official comment from the Methodist Church (I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong). But a drugs story in a far-right tabloid seems to mean that the denomination’s authorities can set to work in a matter of hours – on a Sunday – to suspend someone.

I have been hugely impressed recently by the work done by the Methodist Church to tackle economic injustice. At a national level, they have spoken out strongly against austerity policies and the demonisation of people in poverty. At local level, many Methodist churches are helping out people hit by the economic crisis. Their distorted priorities regarding Flowers and the Co-op Bank have undermined their own standing.

Today, Len Wardle, chairman of the entire Co-operative Group (which also owns the Co-op supermarket and Co-op Funeral Care) has resigned. He has said that he thinks this is right because he led the board that appointed Paul Flowers. His action was honourable, though I doubt it was necessary. He may be more concerned about Flowers’ leadership of the bank than about his drug taking. However, the timing gives the impression that he is responding to the cocaine story.

I have no interest in demonising Paul Flowers or in making assumptions about the circumstances that led him to buy drugs. I deplore his attitude to banking and co-operative business, but I a more concerned with addressing structural problems. The Co-op Bank workers losing their jobs deserve better than this.

It’s no surprise that much of the media will find a story about illegal drugs more interesting than one about the ethics of banking and business. It’s more alarming to see churches and co-operators dancing to the Mail on Sunday’s tune.

Benefit payments and the Living Wage

Posted on by symonhill

UK ministers and their allies are fond of talking about the need to reduce the welfare bill. They give the impression that the welfare bill goes to feckless scroungers, but almost never mention any statistics about who is actually claiming the money.

In reality, less than two percent of the welfare bill goes to non-disabled unemployed people. The biggest chunk goes to older people in the form of pensions, but a sizeable amount goes to people in work. Much of this is paid in tax credits and housing benefits.

Tax credits go to people who are in work but who are not paid enough, while housing benefit is high because there is no cap on private sector rents (so in this case, the real benefit recipients are landlords).

This week is Living Wage Week, when faith groups, unions and individuals across the UK are pushing for all employers to pay a Living Wage. Payment of a Living Wage would reduce the welfare bill and, more importantly, tackle poverty.

Currently the vast majority of the UK’s largest companies do not guarantee a Living Wage to their staff. The organisation Share Action is urging people who own private pensions to email their pension fund about the living wage.

If you have a pension, you can urge the fund to add to the pressure for a Living Wage within the companies in which it invests. Share Action have produced an online form to make the process quick and easy.

This tactic is already working. When Share Action launched their “Just Pay!” campaign for living wages two years ago, just three of the biggest 100 hundred companies in the UK paid the Living Wage. Due to the campaign, ten more of these massive corporations have now responded to public pressure by signing up.

Although I don’t have a pension myself, I wish the best of luck with this tactic to those of you who do. If you want to find out more about the Living Wage, and what you can do to promote it, you can visit the Living Wage site and Share Action.

All baptisms are royal baptisms

Posted on by symonhill

When I complained on Twitter last week about the excessive amount of media coverage given to George Windsor’s baptism, somebody replied with the understandable opinion that it was a welcome change to see Christian sacraments featuring in the news.

I can see his point, although as the week went I on I became convinced that the coverage was bad rather than good news for Christianity. The reporting reinforced prominent misconceptions about baptism, including the idea that it is about conforming to tradition rather than making a radical statement.

The media told us that George was baptised in a “private” ceremony. My idea of “private” does not involve an event that is pictured on the front pages of the next day’s newspapers, but I suppose it’s literally true in that the ceremony was not open to everyone. George was surrounded by people as wealthy and privileged as he will one day be. Media comment focused on the details of the clothes he was wearing and his godparents’ ancestral backgrounds.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of Justin Welby’s prayers, nor of the worship through which the baby was welcomed into the Christian church (although George himself is too young to have much say in the matter). He was splashed with water from the River Jordan, where John the Baptist immersed Jesus two thousand years ago.

That was a rather different event, when people voluntarily walked into a river to repent of their sins and to ask God’s forgiveness. Following Jesus’ resurrection, his disciples continued to practise baptism in water, while also experiencing baptism in the Holy Spirit, a more internal matter of cleansing and rebirth.

It is not known whether the early Christians baptised children as well as adults (the question is the subject of a never-ending debate amongst historians and theologians). What is clear is that baptism was a dangerous business. Being baptised helped to mark people out as Christians at a time when they were marginalised at best and executed at worst.

Christianity gradually became less radical, accepting dominant norms of slavery and gender roles. Then in the fourth century, the emperor Constantine sucked the power out of this once subversive movement by making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and thereby domesticating it. As church leaders were given positions of power and privilege, they found themselves defending ideas they had previously been against (think of Liberal Democrat ministers in the UK government and you’ll get the idea).

With the beginning of Christendom, the church and state became allies, offering support and sanction to each other. All parents were expected to have their children baptised. Baptism, far from being a sign of rejecting the powers of this world, became a symbol of acceptance.

Among the groups who reacted against this were the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century. Emphasising that following Jesus is a matter of personal choice, they baptised each other as adult believers. In many countries by this time, refusing to hand over your child for infant baptism was a criminal offence punishable by death. Anabaptists were martyred in their thousands.

Some Anabaptists survived by fleeing to North America and a few continued to live in Europe. Their influence on other radical Christian movements, such as Quakerism and some strands of the Baptists, is debated but should not be underestimated. Quakers and the Salvation Army developed a different, but equally radical, interpretation of baptism, rejecting the use of water and focused on inward, spiritual baptism alone. The early twentieth century saw the birth of the Pentecostal movement, which emphasises baptism in the spirit as well as in water for adult believers.

To be fair, many supporters of infant baptism see it as a case of welcoming a child into a community rather than simply going through the expected procedure. They also believe they are preparing a child to make a decision for themselves at a later date, despite applying the water in infancy. I am not persuaded by their arguments, but their approach is very different to the popular conception of “christening” as something that is about celebrating birth rather than about joining the church.

It is this misconception that was reinforced by George Windsor’s baptism last week. George is starting out on a life in which – despite enormous wealth – he will be required at every stage to do exactly what is expected of him. Baptism for him looks likely to be the first step on a journey of commitment to the powers of privilege and earthly power.

In baptism, said the apostle Paul, we die and rise with Christ. We dedicate ourselves, in all our fallible humanity, to Jesus Christ. All baptisms are royal baptisms, because they mark out the participants as citizens of the Kingdom of God. Loyalty to that subversive kingdom means rejection of the kingdoms of this world.

Baptism is not about conformity. As early Christians, Anabaptists and Quakers knew to their cost, baptism is an act of rebellion – and it leads to trouble.

———–

The above article appeared as my latest column for the website of the Ekklesia thinktank. Please see http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/news/columns/hill. 

I love Britain. The Daily Mail hates it.

Posted on by symonhill

What is Britain? This question doesn’t seem to have been asked much in the many arguments around the Daily Mail’s vicious attack on Ed Miliband’s father. Ralph Miliband, the Mail maintains, “hated Britain”.

Is “Britain” simply a geographical area? Or does the Mail really mean the United Kingdom, which is a political entity? Or the British people? We talk so much about countries that we can easily forget that nationality is an abstract and ill-defined concept.

The Daily Mail‘s deputy editor Jon Steafel now seems to have come up with a definition of Britain that few British people would recognise.

Defending his paper’s claims, he attacked Ralph Miliband’s “views on British institutions, from our schools to our royal family to our military, to our universities to the church [of England]”.

Steafel’s implication is that to oppose powerful institutions in Britain is to hate Britain. This is nonsense. There is more to Britain than its rulers. It is possible to love a country’s people, to love it as a place and to oppose its political and economic systems. Indeed, love for a country’s people should surely lead to a desire to be rid of unjust institutions that harm them.

I’m not too keen on the United Kingdom as a political entity, but I love the places and people within it. You may be surprised to hear that I also love many aspects of its politics.

I love British traditions of free speech, religious liberty and fair trials (although they’re abused). We have these things because people went out and campaigned for them, not because our rulers kindly handed them down.

I love the radical traditions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Radical egalitarian forms of Christianity became popular in these islands in the seventeenth century, just after England had abolished its monarchy (over a hundred years before France did so; sadly, it didn’t last).

I love the stunning scenery in Snowdonia and the Antrim coast. I love the mix of cultures, languages and religions on the streets of London. I love the friendliness of Cardiff and the feeling of homecoming as the bus goes over Magdalen Bridge in Oxford. I love the rural Midlands roads that I walked down as a child, greasy spoon cafes in Birmingham, the sight of the castle in Edinburgh and the passion of people whose poverty is no barrier to resisting injustice. I love the British people.

The Daily Mail stirs up hatred of the British working class, British Muslims, British LGBT people, British people who were born outside the UK and British people who claim benefits. It is the Daily Mail that hates Britain.

———-

The above article appeared as my latest column for the website of the Ekklesia thinktank. Please see http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/news/columns/hill. 

New war, old story

Posted on by symonhill

There are people who could be very confused by the UK government’s support for human rights in Syria.

People in Bahrain have been banned from protesting by a government that has killed countless numbers of peaceful demonstrators. Far from supporting the protesters’ peaceful struggle, UK ministers are continuing to sell arms to the Bahraini regime that is killing them.

People in West Papua have for years faced violence and oppression at the hands of the Indonesian authorities that occupy them. Indonesian troops have bombed West Papua with British-made aeroplanes.

People in the West Bank continue to suffer the restrictions and humiliation of Israeli occupation. Israeli troops use aircraft and other equipment sold by UK-based companies with the approval of the UK government.

People in Saudi Arabia, who face imprisonment, torture and death to quietly assert their rights, know that their government has for years been making arms deals with the UK government, which looks the other way whenever the topic of the country’s human rights record is raised.

And, perhaps most shockingly, people in Syria will wonder why companies that supply Assad’s vicious regime look set to be allowed to exhibit their products at the London arms fair next month.

The arms fair, euphemistically called Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEi), will almost certainly include representatives of all the regimes mentioned above. They are invited by the UK government. DSEi happens every two years, subsidised with taxpayers’ money.

David Cameron and his colleagues may be genuinely horrified by what is happening in Syria. Most of us are more inconsistent than we like to think. I don’t claim to be any less hypocritical than David Cameron. However, we cannot be expected to swallow the government’s a humanitarian argument for war in Syria two weeks before some of the world’s nastiest dictatorships are invited to send representatives to London to meet arms dealers.

The march to war is eerily familiar. The government are talking about human rights. The opposition are frightened of disagreeing. The media are contrasting war with “doing nothing” as if these were the only two options, and using the term “intervention” to mean “military intervention” as if they were always the same.

Whatever people in Syria need, they do not need yet more weapons and soldiers in their country. They do not need more war, more lies, more feeble excuses. They do not need to be the victims of profiteering or the pawns in other people’s strategic plans.

Arms dealers will benefit if UK and US troops go to war in Syria. Few others are likely to do so.

———–

The London arms fair takes place from 10-13 September, with the main protest on Sunday 8 September. Click for more information.

Justice and revolution at Greenbelt

Posted on by symonhill

I’m already enjoying the Greenbelt festival in Cheltenham, which began yesterday afternoon. If you’re not familiar with, it’s a Christian festival with an emphasis on social and political engagement as well as spirituallity, worship, music and arts. I go every year and, while I’m aware that Greenbelt is not without its faults, I still love it.

I’m honoured to say that I’ve been asked to speak this year. If you’re here and would like to know the details, they’re as follows:

Saturday, 3.30pm, Centaur: Joining a light-hearted Battle of the Visions debate with Jim Wallis and Sara Kewly Hyde. We’ll be discussing what our influence would be if we ran the country (an unlikely possibility but I live in I hope!). I’ll be arguing for “justice”, Jim for “faith” and Sara for “arts”.

Sunday, 3.30pm, Jenin: I’ll be talking about my new book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age, and answering questions

Sunday, 5.30pm, G-Books: Signing copies of my books and happily talking about them to anyone who would like to ask more.

See you there!

“Bongo Bongo Land” controversy: Cut arms, not aid

Posted on by symonhill

Last year, I visited the Judean desert and met with people who used a water pipe
funded by UK aid money. Before the pipe was fitted, the villagers often had to go ten days without a bath. Now they can bathe every three days. They are also better able to water their vegetables and feed their livestock. The aid money has thus made them more independent, not less.

Despite this, the money is not solving their core problems. These once nomadic people are now largely static, prevented from moving about the desert by the Israeli armed forces, who use the area for training exercises. They live on the eastern side of Palestine, near the Jordanian border.

The UK government had helped them by funding a water pipe, but is failing to help them by speaking out firmly against the behaviour of Israel’s government and army, which might do more to change the underlying situation. British ministers are happy to keep selling weapons to Israel.

I’ve been thinking about this complexity today, following the scandal surrounding UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, who referred to countries that receive UK aid as “Bongo Bongo Land”.

Yesterday, he was said to have “apologised”. Looking at the wording of his statement, I think the word “apology” is stretching it a bit:

“I understand from UKIP party chairman Steve Crowther and leader Nigel Farage that I must not use the terminology in the future, nor will I and sincerely regret any genuine offence which might have been caused or embarrassment to my colleagues.”

So not an apology but a “regret”. And no acceptance that his term is racist, but only a recognition that his party leaders have told him not to use it.

When initially challenged over his “Bongo Bongo Land” comments, Bloom said “It’s sad how anybody can be offended by a reference to a country that doesn’t exist.”

But of course, the countries that receive UK aid do exist and it these countries that Bloom has named “Bongo Bongo Land”. Also, as Zoe Williams points out in an excellent article today, the term has long been used as a derogatory reference to former British colonies.

I am tempted to get sidetracked and focus on Bloom’s other bigoted views (not long after his election, he said that “no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age”). He is a reminder that UKIP is the latest face of the British far-right. But instead, I would rather challenge his views on UK aid.

His opinions on aid are shared by a number of Tory MPs and newspapers. The front page of today’s Daily Mail trails an article by Stephen Glover declaring that Bloom “spoke for Britain on foreign aid”.

The government’s policy is that aid should amount to 0.7% of public spending. That’s 0.7%. Just to be clear, that’s less than a penny in every pound. That’s seven pence out of a tenner. It is not a large proportion.

There are many things that can be said in defence of aid spending – that we live in an interconnected world, that we have a responsibility to each other, that many of the countries receiving UK aid are still suffering from the effects of the transatlantic slave trade and other injustices handed out by the rulers of the British Empire.

All of these are true. But although I am a strong supporter of aid spending, and of the 0.7% commitment, I don’t want to respond to Bloom’s comments by making an uncritical defence of the government’s aid plans.

For one thing, certain ministers are happy to look for ways of observing the letter but not the spirit of this commitment. The government has written off unjust debt and then counted this as aid money – even when the debt in question stood no chance of being repaid. David Cameron has even suggested that part of the aid budget could go towards military spending while still being counted as aid.

For aid to be really effective, it needs to work alongside other, more basic measures that will have a longer-lasting effect. Debt jubilees, new structures for international trade and a new financial system will have much more effect than aid alone.

As I saw in the Judean desert last year, aid spending can be helpful while also being undermined by the UK government’s other activities. For all David Cameron’s talk, aid spending is still vastly smaller than military spending. UKIP not only want to cut aid spending, they want to increase military spending (or “defence spending” as it’s euphemistically called) by a wapping 40%.

If we really want to cut the deficit at the same time as building a more just world, it’s arms we need to cut, not aid.