The BNP

If there’s one thing that we’re supposed to be good at in this country it’s discriminating against people on the basis of their class. Why is it then that we have got ourselves into a position where on June 4 we might be sending a new BNP MEP off to Europe? Thanks to proportional representation, if the BNP get 8.4% of the vote in the North West of England in the upcoming European elections then they will have a seat in Brussels. At best this will be colossally embarrassing; at worst it’s the first step on the road to full-blown Naziorrhoea.

The BNP is not representative of the working class. But the working class have more justifiable reasons to feel aggrieved about immigration than the middle class do. Table 1 shows that respondents to the 2006 British Social Attitudes survey who identified themselves as working class were less inclined than respondents who identified themselves as middle class to agree that people from abroad who settle in Britain have a right to call themselves British.

These data do not show a huge divergence between the two groups but I want to keep going with this blog post and it has no foundation other than the lazy generalisation that working class people are more likely than middle class people to be concerned about immigration and support the BNP. Moreover, I was quite taken with the opening sentence of this blog when it came to me; it is for the sake of its preservation that I proceed.

The experience of immigration for working class and middle class people is different. For middle class people immigration means North Indian Frontier Cuisine, great sushi and Slumdog Millionaire. For working class people it might mean increased competition for jobs and sending your children to a school where 40% of the pupils do not have English as a first language.* Some people will have more thoroughgoing reasons for being in favour of relatively open immigration but middle class people who approve of immigration for whatever reason must be aware that they are can scarcely help but be complacent given that it is unlikely that it will adversely affect their lives.

In the coming years I look to the Tory party who have behind them centuries' experience in ignoring and marginalising everyone other than the elite. If they bring any of that skill to bear then I'm sure they could crush the BNP. In the meantime we do not have a Tory government to rely on and we will have to find other ways of halting the BNP at the European election. Students that have moved away from home to go to university have an opportunity to vote in local elections where they go to university as well as back home. This has always seemed to me to be a appallingly undemocratic state of affairs and I have not previously taken advantage of this loophole. I could have voted for the congestion charge in Manchester but because I am unlikely to remain in this region after I graduate I felt that it would be unfair for me to express my will in the referendum. I might like to have a say in the presidential election in the US but it is right that I am not allowed to.

Incidentally, this was not a view shared by the Guardian who in 2004 launched Operation Clark County and encouraged readers to send letters to voters on Ohio advising them on who to vote for.

However, this might be just the time to put this undemocratic set up to good use. If we were able to mobilise tens of thousands of middle class students with no interest in the future of the North West to vote for anyone other than the BNP then it might be possible to stop the BNP gaining a European seat. Such an effort in indeed being organised by Hope Not Hate. It seems that in Britain today we still have a political set up that allows us to keep the marginalised disenfranchised if only we have the courage to use it.

I should add that I was inspired to write this BNP blog because an article about the BNP kept my article from getting the top spot on the Most Popular section of the Student Direct website. A far right forum called Stormfront encouraged BNP sympathisers to troll the message board for the BNP article to create the impression that the BNP is more popular and has more internet presence than it actually does. It is my opinion that it is their fault that my article was never on the top spot and it has nothing to do with the BNP article being better, more interesting and more thoroughly researched than mine. They're going to be sorry they crossed me, eh?

*These claims are not based on any real research; I made them up so you should take them with a pinch of salt. I recommend Maldon sea salt. The advice on how much a pinch of Maldon sea salt is is contradictory; you should keep your own counsel. The Maldon sea salt box says, "Its pronounced and distinctive 'salty' taste means less is required, an advantage for those who wish to reduce their salt intake." On the other hand, Nigella Lawson says that it is less salty than table salt and you should use more.

Narcissism Watch

I am growing increasingly aware that my persistent going on about my article in Student Direct, its sub-editing and the response to it fairly stinks of self-obsession. However, before I stop talking about it, I thought that I would put another link to my article on the Student Direct website because it has some comments now. The College Media Matters blog has also mentioned my article. I now feel very exposed and want to retreat into a cave.

***

The warm feeling of life on Twitter knows no bounds. I was recently honoured to have a few exchanges with the sublime Fred Deakin of Lemon Jelly fame. I hadn't listened to this Make Things Right B-side before but I plan to make amends now by listening to it all afternoon.

Sam Hill

What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Tom Meltzer, a 21 year old, has a column in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Apparently, he is doing work experience at the Guardian and he has been allowed to fill in for Charlie Brooker this week (Charlie Brooker has a herniated C7 disc and cannot write his column at the moment).

The more keen-brained among you will have realised, upon discovering this blog, that I have some ambitions in the direction of being allowed to write things for newspapers. Opening G2 this morning to find that a 21 year old had written a column was galling. I felt much like what I imagine an Olympic sprinter would feel like if while he was wandering around behind the starting blocks with his trousers still on and doing a bit of stretching, another runner set off three minutes before the gun, jogged to the finish line and was declared the winner. Here I am putting my toe in the water with a little blog and pathetically grateful to have garbled versions of my articles in the fucking student newspaper, and there he is swilling around the Guardian offices gayly tossing off columns for national consumption.

***

The student newspaper's campaign to ruin my embryonic Reputation As A Journalist continued this week. I wrote into the paper following the publication of my article last week: "Dear Student Direct, [Fouls] has obviously not being watching the same The Wire as me otherwise he wouldn't have called it 'a typical US drama.' Yours faithfully, [Fouls]." I later regretted this but thought that anyone who read it would, at worse, dismiss it as nonsense spouted by a misguided eccentric. It did not feature as a letter. Instead it cropped up in the "Text Us" section minus the "Yours faithfully, [Fouls]" bit. This, you will realise, removed the point. My attempt to make a mild jibe at the paper's overly alteration-happy sub-editing and make clear where I stand on the subject of The Wire has been deflected back at me. Student Direct is like a bully who, having grabbed my hands, is asking me, "Why are you hitting yourself Fouls? Stop hitting yourself," while pummelling me in the face... maybe over-egged it a bit there, but perhaps you see what I am trying to say.

I was more pleased to discover that there was a letter of complaint about my article from someone other than me. My article was described as "almost comically cynical". I had to read this a few times but I think that we are meant to understand "comically cynical" to be a bad thing.

Grand Début de Fouls!

Today is the day that I, Fouls, have had a thing printed in the student newspaper. Without further ado, here it is for you: my great blog reading public – without you none of this would have been possible.

The CV Piece

I have written this so that I can write “wrote for the student newspaper” in my CV. It may also mean that under “Early Career” in my Wikipedia entry (no such thing currently exists; an astonishing lapse on the part of my fans) you will see the sentence “At university he wrote for the student newspaper” rather than “At university he watched all of YouTube”. I think that it is important that I make my motive plain now and remind you that you need not read any further.

I had toyed with the idea of filling up the rest of these 650-750 words with a load of aimless wittering about how I had thought even when I was in school that it would be a good idea to write for the student newspaper. Other, as yet unfulfilled, ambitions included becoming really good at tango, becoming really good at capoeira, ditto photography, acting and directing, and developing enormous muscles. But I am not going to waste your time (at least not in that way). Prepare instead, dear reader, for your world to be upended by my incisive and damning examination of The Whole Sordid Business Of Writing Stuff For The Student Newspaper Just To Say That You’ve Done So In Your CV itself!

It would not be controversial, I think, to claim that the CV-bolstering instinct accounts for much of what is written in this paper. People write and submit pieces for all sorts of other reasons — many of them noble, I’m sure — but career prospects must be at the forefront of many a student writer’s mind. Is this a bad thing? After all, this pursuit of self-interest ensures that every issue of our student weekly is well stocked with articles. Arguably, it would be a skimpier publication were this incentive absent.

Self-interest, it seems, is the central issue here and in what follows I present for your delectation my little treatise on the subject based on stuff that I have seen on the telly. The Wire (kind of a drama) is a programme that hates careerists. It tells stories of institutional dysfunction and more often than not change is obstructed by characters’ desire for self-advancement. In another television programme, Adam Curtis’ documentary The Trap, an alternative take on self-interest is presented in an interview with economist James M. Buchanan who suggests that public servants who are motivated by things other than money (cited alternatives are job satisfaction and a sense of public duty) are dangerously unpredictable and “zealots”.

“So,” you say, “what does this mean for Student Direct? Please enlighten me further.” I say, “Open your mind. Let us not look solely at student journalism let us look also at student politics.” That’s right, sit up; we’re talking Politics now. I have no figures to hand but I’m not going to let that hold me back from claiming that a large proportion of Manchester students don’t bother to vote in the union elections. I’ve certainly never bothered voting. In my first year I went along to the union to vote but the queue looked to be several orders of scale larger than the shit that I gave about who got elected.

The main reason that I tend not to vote in these elections is the spectre of careerism that I see hanging over the whole event. Many of our national politicians start off in student unions; often it is the beginning of their political careers. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron have been marketed on the basis of their not having been involved in student politics; it seems that their strategists identified that the British public has a distaste for cloistered political careerists. I share this distaste; you may not. So I hope that if you voted in the union elections recently you thought about your political convictions, your partisan leanings and all that good stuff, but you might now spare a moment to think about think about how you would feel in twenty years time if you saw the face of that person you voted for turn up on Question Time pontificating about welfare-dependence or equivocating about immigration with Paxman or pretending be on first name terms with the UN Secretary-General in smarmy conversation with Andrew Neil. Could you live with it? You helped them on the way. Think about it.

***

Now, far be from me to bite the hand that slightly enhances my career prospects, I have some problems with the sub-editing. This was the cue for much Eastwood-in-Gran-Torino-esque grunting: grrrrrr! I realise that I have this in common with anyone who has ever written a thing for printing in a bigger thing but who's going to stop me having a moan anyway? It's not going to be you, that's for sure. What you see above is how I originally wrote the article. It is not perfect and in fact I am quite embarrassed by it for all sorts of narcissistic reasons; we needn't go into that as there is plenty of self loathing elsewhere on this blog (particularly in the early posts, if you are interested). However, some of the things that got changed were weird. There was some editing for length; this, I am fine with. But in the first paragraph the word "lapse" was joined by the words "of judgement" for no reason. Later on the the word "spectre" was Americanised. The word "wittering" became "twittering"(!?). Worst of all, perhaps, The Wire became "a typical US drama"... I'm sorry The Wire, very, very sorry. This is just a taster; there were other changes and I imagine that were you to see them you would be just as scandalised as I was. As such, I will post the altered version as a comment on here as soon as it goes up on the paper's website.

Despite all this, the fact of this thing's being printed is basically good news. Hurrah!

(Should also mention some of the Good Changes: condensing some of my nonsense and a great title: This Will Look Good On My CV. Thanks).

Update: this is the picture of me that was used:



In the cropped version in the paper I looked like I might turn into Brian Blessed at any moment.

Repulsed of Foulstopia

Here's an article from the sports section of my university's newspaper last week:

THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN QUESTION
By Matt Nixon, Sports Editor

SCOTLAND HAVE been a thorn in the side of the home nations for too long; it is time for this to be addressed. They beat England in the Six Nations last year for God’s sake. Scotland’s sporting sovereignty needs to be rescinded.

After the infamous West Lothian question – in which Scottish MP Tam Dalyell pointed out that he could vote with merry abandon in Westminster on issues that were only being proposed for England – Scotland have frankly been taking the piss. And now it’s sport’s turn to suffer.

The idea of a Great Britain football team is one that has been mooted for a long time. It’s a nice idea, especially as we head towards London 2012, when we will compete as Great Britain, as per every Olympics. But the idea is always shot down by Scotland. They fear for their national football union’s sovereignty, and refuse point-blank to consider the concept of such a team in case it is the first step towards outlawing Scotland as an entity. Never mind devolution. Never mind the Scottish Parliament. Don’t those measures suggest that really the majority of people are quite happy to let Scotland be, and certainly don’t fancy storming Edinburgh to reassert proper Westminster rule on the recalcitrant Jocks?

Well now is the time to say, quite frankly, f*ck off Scotland. Which players does Wee Jock McVitie at the SFA think Great Britain would want anyway? Craig Gordon, currently being kept out of the Sunderland side by a Hungarian goatherd? You could say that this is the sporting West Lothian question – the Heart of Midlothian question, if you will – Scotland pissing in England’s porridge (NOT “porage”, if any tartan-clad illiterates from Scott’s Oats are reading) because they know it wouldn’t affect them in the least as their players would never get picked.

For a while, England fans that wanted to hedge their bets mooted the idea – nobody wanted a Great Britain team, they just wanted England with Ryan Giggs. Or going back further, George Best. Or John Charles. Rarely in history has there been a side other than England capable of dominating a Home Nations Select XI. But though it would be forced, of course, and artificial, a team picked from all the home nations, with a limit on players from each side would be a nice gesture of solidarity, especially since sport is at its best as a means for unison rather than division, particularly when it comes to the Olympics.

I can almost hear the cry from across the border: “Alright then you arrogant English, we’ll take back Chris Hoy and his medals! Ha! See how you like that!” Well, OK. Build him your own Velodrome then. With any luck it’ll go the same way as the Scottish Parliament building.

***

And here's a couple of letters of complaint about that article in this week's edition (the second one is from me):

Dear Student Direct,

I am emailing to complain about the column on page 30 of the 9th March issue of Student Direct.

This article (and I use the term loosely) is a blatant and, indeed, self-satisfied prejudiced. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing I have become sickeningly used to reading in the this uninspiring waste of paper. What makes this even worse, however, is that Matt Nixon's main issue with Scotland is that they won't do what the English say. He seemingly believes that English sports persons are inherently better that Scottish ones, for no other reason than that they are English. In addition to this, he uses the term "home nations" to mean England itself, as if this were the only nation worth bothering about.

I am English myself and have no connections with Scotland, but I find this column offensive to say the least. It is obvious that if this sort of trash is allowed to be printed in the newspaper (again note the stretching of the meaning of this word to its limits) once, then I am sure it will be again, whether it is aimed at Scotland, Wales, Ireland or any other country.

Yours

A very disgusted Simon Rookyard



Dear Student Direct,

To form a Great Britain football team for the 2012 Olympics would be a nakedly political move. It would not be "a heartwarming gesture of solidarity" for the SNP and its supporters who are sufficiently numerous to mean that Scotland has a SNP government.

Furthermore, I take exception to some of the language that this article was couched in. Does the phrase "fuck off Scotland" have a place in a newspaper that claims to be representative of all University of Manchester students? Scottish students here may be relatively few in number but nevertheless we are here. It is surprising to see this Kelvin MacKenzie-style vitriol in Student Direct.

Incidentally, the people at Scott's Porage Oats chose a vernacular spelling not because they are "tartan-clad illiterates" but in order to give their brand a superficially authentic feel.

Yours faithfully,

[Fouls]

***

Now, what do yous make of all this? I was pleased that this other guy also wrote in; he uses less temperate language than I do and I think the two letters complimented each other nicely on the letters page. I decided to avoid using the word "offended" or any of its variants mainly because I recently listened to Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens talking about the pointlessness of pathetic people who make their business to be offended. It's a good tip, I think.

I don't know Matt Nixon but in visiting the Student Direct website to find this article I discovered that he won the Guardian Student Sports Writer of the Year Award last year.

I should add that the main reason for this post is plump up the blog with absolutely anything I write. Probably, I'll soon be publishing all of my emails off Amazon and that sort of thing. Anything to avoid last year's nine month hiatus.

But the other reason is to see what my readers think about this. Should I have been angrier? Should this guy be sacked? Did I misread the article and it was actually perfectly friendly about Scotland (a fear that I had after I sent off that letter)? It would be nice to get some comments on this. In particular, comments that incite the organising of lynch mobs etc.