The Ship of Fools: A Fictional Reality
Hope Roberts

"The probability of the decision element at the top correctly measuring the system state decreases exponentially with the depth of the hierarchy. Each level adds noise to the information as it passes through. Thus the measurement signal is very noisy in a large bureaucracy."¹

Agitated, fingers strumming on the table, he looks nervous. There is a bead of sweat on his brow, he straightens up; he doesn't need to rise to the bait. What was it he learned at college again, how to deal with conflict, that's it, how to listen and diffuse.
"Are you listening to me, I need help."
"Don't talk to me like that."
"But I'm at the end of my tether, are you going to do ANYTHING for me?"
"Don't speak to me so aggressively."
"I'm getting desperate, you take her. I've been doing this for too long, I need help, you take her..."
"I'm leaving. I can't take this abusive behaviour any more."
He attaches his pen to his clipboard and stands up to leave. He hears a sob. He touches the woman's arm and says, "Phone me, you can talk to me any time you want."
"But I only ever get your answer machine."
He gets into his four wheel drive and turns the key in the ignition, sighs, another job well done.
She finds herself part of an ongoing and surreal experience; of people working within a system so random they have no control over it, where policy decided by some distant committee dictates what happens in the lives of people dependant on others for their care. Where those who provide care try, and fail, to interpret these policies in relation to the reality of people's lives, dictated by limited finances and limited support.

Those with severe mental health problems, long term illness or learning disabilities are being further handicapped, their lives limited by pointless levels of bureaucracy which cause unimaginable stress to them, their families and care workers. To illustrate: Care in the Community and Inclusion in an ideal world means that everyone is entitled to live in the community and access community activities, such as vocational education, as and when they need them. However, overall, there is little flexibility or creativity in the narrow menu of services and support available to people with learning disabilities, their families and carers.² The reality for many people is that a new form of day service is in place. With limited community resources and funding, town centres, bowling alleys and parks are full of people with learning disabilities; turning cheap or free public spaces into unofficial day centres/hospital wards.³ If we could work together, look at quality, sustainability, invest time and energy into getting it right, then perhaps we could create something which actively supports the individual from opportunity to opportunity - giving them some form of quality of life.
By breaking up the way care is provided, with responsibilities divided across different departments and funding bodies, it has become infinitely more difficult to find one person within local authority who is accountable for service provision. As a practical outcome, for the individual receiving the care, to challenge the service becomes almost an anathema, as you can't actually locate who is responsible for it. A subsequent problem begins to emerge: through splitting up care and making accountability harder to identify, it becomes virtually impossible to detect carelessness and indifference, thereby victimising those who the policies were established to protect in the first place.

Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down

She sits holding her clip file. Self important, she lords it over an emotional wreck of a woman. The woman's getting agitated, she can give her what she wants or she can let her wait. She will let her wait, leave her in limbo. It must feel so good, all that power: she can make decisions which will change her insignificant little life. She can decide whether she deserves it, and she doesn't think that she does. Does she?
As her brother, he thought he knew a thing or two about learning disability but after his father died he had his eyes opened wide. This new found sight was affording him a glimpse of another world, a world of petty bureaucracy, mediocre service and burnt out carers. Emphasis changed for him. It became all important to get a house for his sister, to help his mother. Countless meetings, emails, telephone calls and letters, a campaign to local MSPs and councillors, meetings with social work managers and still things aren't going anywhere. At first he is told it is because there was no house available; then it is because there wasn't the finance; then it was because they have too many other people to deal with. He feels tense: his mother wont stop crying and his sister is confused; nipping, scratching and biting anyone who comes near her. The situation is starting to get desperate.

The more desperate you are, the more emotional you become, and the less likely you are to get the help you require. The irony being, the more desperate you become the more help you require. You end up passed from person to person, lost within a system controlled by trivial protocols. The people working within it have to spend so much of their time filling in forms, counting pennies and covering their backs, it leaves little time to deal with people face to face.
Agencies established to support people with learning disabilities and their carers can find themselves in a no win situation. These agencies are dependent on their funding from local authorities. Problem being, as a result they are unable to speak out against inequalities, because if they do they may lose their funding or not have their contracts renewed.
On a wider point, the new Independent Mental Capacity Act⁴ allows for an Independent Consultee to advocate for those people who have no family or friends to speak on their behalf. The problem remains: if that independent consultee is funded by the local authority, how can they speak out on behalf of an individual if what they are saying goes against/contradicts the policies of the people who sign their paycheque? Is it a case of split loyalty?

Burn Out A Series of Disjointed Vignettes

She picks up the phone, dials.
"Yes," says a tired voice at the other end of the phone.
"I want to talk to you about how you are getting on sorting out care/housing/respite/funding for your son/daughter?"
"I'm very tired, I can't do much, it's still the same, there's not much I can say to you, it just goes on."
She sighs and puts the phone down.
Her friend found a house for her daughter who has a learning disability, three years ago. Her daughter shares with another man, and a private care agency provides her care. She says the care workers aren't trained⁵ and in fact are frightened by her daughter's behaviour. House staff no longer want to work with her and added to that her house mate doesn't want to share the house with her any more. The fighting can get physical and her daughters behaviour is getting worse. The mother describes the situation as a time bomb. Until recently, she was receiving phone calls from care staff at all hours of the night, demanding she calm her daughter down. She says if she goes over to the house and sees her in such a state of anxiety she will have to move her back to her home. After all, she is her mother. She has been told that if she removes her daughter from the house, she will have to stay with her permanently and she will lose all her care. So she has to watch from a distance as her daughter gets increasingly depressed and more and more likely to lash out. She has a bright idea. To try and ensure her daughter's well being, she has offered to move out of her council house, so that her daughter can move in, have her house, and the mother will arrange to live elsewhere. All she needs is the funding for her carers. Her social worker is very helpful. She describes her as 'salt of the earth', but it's not up to her. It's her managers who are holding things up: they say they can't find the money.
He looks at her. "Its about giving your son choice and person centred planning⁶, about listening to what you all need."
She looks blank.
He leaves her house and gets into his car.
She looks out the window, watches him drive off, picks up the phone and calls her daughter. "I have no idea what he just said to me," she tells her.
Back in the office he listens to the messages on his answer machine. He skips the more irate messages. Sits down, flicks through his paperwork: another training programme to attend on Choice, Empowerment and Vulnerability. The phone rings. He leans over and switches his answer machine back on.
She's on the phone again. This time to a mother in her early sixties; her husband left years ago. Her son has a profound learning disability; he's in his mid-thirties. The mother is one of these women who won't complain, doesn't want to trouble people. She can hear from her voice that a life time of caring has taken its toll. Her son doesn't sleep well at night, so his mother sleeps lightly, listening out for footsteps on the floor in case her son falls down the stairs. Her son attends a Day Centre five days a week for six hours a day. On top of that, she gets home help for about seven hours a week. So every morning she gets up, washes her son and gets him dressed, feeds him breakfast and gets him ready to go. Every afternoon her son comes home about 3pm. She feeds him, they sit and watch telly, she washes him, gets him undressed and puts him to bed. She has done this more or less every day for the last thirty-five years, except on a Saturday and Sunday when they get to be with each other all day with the exception of three hours, when she gets to go to the shops on her own. She loves her son and is scared of what will happen to him when she is gone. She doesn't particularly trust anyone else to look after him, but now she is willing to let go. For the past five years she's been trying to sort out housing for her son, but she is not a fighter. She has offered to give up her own home, in order that her son and his carers can have somewhere to live. She, in turn, will move to sheltered housing. The social work department say that they don't have all the money for his care - as having staff that would need to be awake all night would be too expensive. So in the meantime she waits and they both get older and more vulnerable. Perhaps if she collapses they will listen to her.⁷
"Look, all you have to do is ask them to put you on the housing list and get a doctor to describe your sons disability accurately. Make sure that the social work department psychiatrist gets that information along with a number of letters of support. That will give him all the points he needs to get to the top of the housing list. I have compiled a catalogue of meetings and broken promises they have made with your family since 1990. It was 1990 when you first requested a house, wasn't it?"
"Yes," they look at her hopefully.
"I have to stay out of this, you say you put all this together, I cant be seen to be involved in this in any way. All I can say is that they are treating you badly and that the catalogue I've put together will embarrass them into doing something for you."
"They took away my respite,"⁸ she says through tears. She's seventy years old; her daughter still stays at home. Her daughter has profound learning disabilities and severe physical disabilities. She needs round the clock personal care. "They told me the respite home isn't properly equipped for people with such extensive physical disabilities", she says, "but I told them she's been staying there for six years and there has never been a problem, but they wouldn't listen. They said its policy."⁹
For six months they have been in a state of extreme distress: mentally preparing for their daughter to move home, guilty about moving their daughter into someone else's care, stressed by the constant worry for their daughter's personal safety, let alone the practicalities of getting her house ready. On top of that, they still don't know if their daughter is actually going to be able to move in as they have not heard anything from Social Work in months.
They have the best carers in the world for their daughter; real honest people who know and like their daughter, and they know their daughter likes them. Things are starting to happen. People are starting to talk to each other; it looks like the move may just happen. Trouble is, the care costs are too high. They have been told if it goes beyond a certain cost then the Social Work department will have to ask other companies to tender for the contract. That means their daughter will be cared for by people who don't know her. They are told that the costs need to be kept lower. There are a few days to go, a decision has to be made, but they are still wrangling over the costs. They are both tense, guilty, desperate. They get a phone call: the care organisation and social work department have managed to agree on a price. Their daughter moves in. But what about the actual care? Have all eventualities been planned for? In amongst negotiating costs they try to remember if they were ever asked about their daughters medical needs. A niggling doubt eats away at them, "What if... ?"
She is sitting in her living room. She has an opened letter in her hand. It is from the Social Work department. She skims its contents and sees the word funding. Her chest tightens, she finds it hard to breathe, but she needs to talk to someone. She's in a state of panic: what if they don't have the money and her daughter has to move back in with her. How would she cope? She picks up the phone, her hands are shaking. She dials and the phone rings out.
"Hello, I'm not at my desk at the moment if you would like to leave a message after the tone I will get back to you as soon as I can."

In Conclusion

Learning disability care has become a business, with individuals and their carers transformed into facts and figures to be overseen by social workers who now have to act like accountants. Pretending that these complicated situations don't exist doesn't make them go away, and not planning for them properly has real long term implications. In fact, lack of clear understanding of the day-to-day reality of the situations people find themselves in is exacerbated further by disjointed support and misunderstood policy, as much as it is by limited funding. I am concerned that the policies we are creating to protect those we view as vulnerable inhibits the levels of care they receive. We are actually limiting what they can do, how they do it, where they do it and how we describe how they do it - becoming so protective that we compromise their well being. In relation to the quality of the services and their appropriateness to the individual, listening to the individual and their carers, rather than counting pennies, will result in services which will cost less in the long term, both financially and emotionally.
Maybe one day the people who make the decisions will realise that they should come and see what is actually happening on the ground, experience it from the lower end of the hierarchy, and then perhaps they will create a service which actually provides for the people who really need it.


Notes
1. Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy.
2. Independence, well-being and choice, 28th July, 2005. Keith Smith, Chief Executive, BILD.
3. "The Scottish Commission on the Regulation of Care should be given the resources needed to monitor, audit and guide the service providers on standards and best practice in community care services." The Scottish Parliament, Research Note RN 01/23, 14 February 2001.
4. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 provides a statutory framework to empower and protect vulnerable people who are not able to make their own decisions. It makes it clear who can take decisions, in which situations, and how they should go about this. It enables people to plan ahead for a time when they may lose capacity.
5. "Staff at all levels should have access to, and be encouraged to participate in, appropriate training on multidisciplinary working and team building. This should include opportunities for cross agency placement." The Scottish Parliament, Research Note RN 01/23, 14 February 2001, Delivery of Community Care in Scotland.
6. "We suggest that this takes the form of a new personal life plan. This plan would be for everyone who has a learning disability and wants a life plan. The plan should describe how the person, his or her family and professionals, will work together to help that person lead a fuller life." The same as you? A review of services for people with learning disabilities, The Scottish Executive.
7. "Local authorities, by working with health boards and the voluntary sector, should make sure that they look at the extra needs of those with profound and multiple disabilities and those of their carers. The centre for learning disability should set up a national network of support to local providers offering advice and training on the extra needs of people with profound and multiple disabilities." http://www.scotland.gov.uk/ldsr/docs/tsay-08.asp 'Recommendation 29', The same as you? A review of services for people with learning disabilities, The Scottish Executive.
8. Care given as an alternate care arrangement with the primary purpose of giving the carer or a resident a short term break from their usual care arrangement.
www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/publishing.nsf/Content/ageing-manuals-rcm-contents-glossar3.htm
9. "The issue of reasonable risk-taking is closely related to choice and is of great importance, if people with learning disabilities are to lead full lives in the community. However, literature in this area shows discrepancies in the ways in which risk is perceived. People with learning disabilities have been viewed as keen to take risks, while their family carers have been perceived as being protective and seeing risks as hazardous. Professionals, it has been suggested, have a more balanced view." The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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I am Curious – Red

Alexander Kennedy talks to Bruce LaBruce about his new film 'The Raspberry Reich', where subversive sexuality and radical anti-capitalist politics becomes cultural terrorism.

Alexander Kennedy: Most of your early films have been political without being overtly so – by this I mean you depict that which could be naïvely perceived as a 'sub culture' (queer punks, homo/phobic skinheads), so why did you decide to take this to the opposite extreme and make your characters constantly bark out political slogans in 'The Raspberry Reich'?

Bruce LaBruce: With 'The Raspberry Reich' I decided to revisit my albeit modest academic training and make something dynamic and spectacular out of it, an approach more proactive than my usual strategy of merely identifying as a "recovering academic". I was partly motivated by the response of "the left" (if such an entity still exists) to 9/11, which seemed to me to be a non-response to the point of castration. Suddenly open debate based on formerly orthodox leftist principles was perceived as impolitic, if not downright treasonous. The fact that a small group of terrorists could demolish leftist discourse with one simple yet spectacular gesture made a big impression on me, and made me want to revisit terrorist organisations of the past in order to study the fundamental dynamics of terrorism. So even though the terrorists behind 9/11, who are Islamic fundamentalists, are about as far away as you can get in terms of ideology from the extreme left wing terrorist organisations of the west from the past several decades (the RAF, the SLA, the Weathermen, etc.), I was interested in seeing if any of the socio-political dynamics were similar. What struck me when I revisited the manifestos of the SLA, the RAF, etc. was that if you didn't know they were issued by terrorist organisations, they could be read merely as good old-fashioned, orthodox leftist rhetoric – Marxist-based ideas about sharing the wealth, supporting the rights of disenfranchised minorities, questioning and challenging authority, promoting non-conformist behaviour, supporting the rights of the working class, etc. The difference was that for these organisations, any ends justified the means, and they would inevitably end up contravening or even contradicting their own original principles in order to achieve their goals – in effect the oppressed was more than willing to become the oppressor. The same can be said for Islamic terrorists whose claims to a kind of moral or spiritual superiority are completely negated by their breach of fundamental principles of the sanctity of life. Also, the reaction of western 'democracies' to both kinds of 'terrorist' group is similar – in the face of (arguably minor) threats, the automatic suspension of civil liberties, the sanctioned use of torture and murder, the use of double speak and rhetorical overdrive to camoflage the abandonment of democratic principles. Anyway, I didn't get into this in detail in 'The Raspberry Reich', but this was the background I was looking at. Also, in my first feature length film, 'No Skin Off My Ass', the lesbian film-maker sister of the skinhead character is shown conducting screen tests for a movie she wants to make called 'Girls of the SLA' while Angela Davis can be heard on the soundtrack talking about the Black Panthers and strategies of violent resistance. So I had the germ of the idea there already for 'The Raspberry Reich'.

AK: Through didactic political sloganeering and queered political diatribes you demonstrate that sub cultures seem to be the unwitting conduits of power (by happily but stupidly rallying around what is perceived to be 'outside' or 'counter' to power). Your work could be seen as cynical or realistic because of this, so, is there any use for an avant-garde resistance? Is such a thing possible?

BLAB: I didn't want 'The Raspberry Reich' to be read as a complete indictment of subcultural resistance or revolution, but in the current conformist climate it's certainly tempting to interpret it that way. Actually it's even bleaker than that: At least subcultural militant movements of the past, such as the gay, black, and feminist movements of the seventies, were smart and stylish and had ideas about social and political revolution. Today it seems that the only goal of subcultural or minority movements is to assimilate and gain the same status as the establishment. Gays, for example, fight for the right to participate in the most traditional institutions of the dominant culture, and have easily become its best consumers. In terms of the black movement, the Marxist leanings of the Black Panthers have been replaced by the status hungry, materialistic, sexist and homophobic empire of hip-hop. So indeed the oppressed has become the oppressor with a vengeance. (Feminism, alas, simply disappeared.) 'The Raspberry Reich', in bombarding the audience with the leftist manifestos of yesteryear, veers into nostalgia, but it's also designed to re-introduce those ideas into public discourse. The movie makes fun of radicals who don't practice what they preach, but it's also a somewhat romanticised look at people who want to change the world radically.

AK: 'The Raspberry Reich' could be seen as a parody of as well as an exercise in late feminist and queer theories, where sexuality becomes an ontologically empty category, only readable through stylised acts. Do you feel your work is counter to that tradition or is it a continuation of it?

BLAB: Hmm, I'm not sure that sexuality becomes an ontologically empty category in the movie, mainly because the movie is a porno, which works fairly strictly within the conventions of pornography. I think what gives the movie it's political verve, if I may be so bold, is that it's about sexual revolution and the characters in it are actually having real, unsimulated sex. For me that is putting your Marxism where your mouth is. Susanne Sachsse, the respected Berlin stage actress who plays Gudrun, courageously decided to have real sex in the movie even though it could have had consequences for her career. Having real sex wasn't a condition of playing the role – I left it up to her, but I told her I would be happy if she did. But no matter how "stylised" the sexual act becomes through porn conventions, it's still palpably real, which has an effect on the audience. But of course the movie is also a parody of feminist and queer theories and theorists, particularly those who don't recognise the real consequences of their theories. I used to encounter academics, for example, who supported and encouraged the sex trade or pornography to the point of participating in it themselves, only to find several years down the line that they were in over their heads and couldn't deal with the implications of what they had done. It's one thing to put theory into practice, another to practice it in the real world and not in some controlled or simulated or academic environment.

AK: To continue this idea of style then – stylistically, 'The Raspberry Reich' utilises the colours, language and designs of political propaganda, invoking Russian Constructivist graphic design and more obviously, Barbara Kruger's advertising aesthetic. Did you consciously use these sources as references and what else did you draw on?

BLAB: I did actually think of Barbara Kruger and Russian Constructivism, but more so of Godard and Makavejev. My three main filmic references were Godard's 'La Chinoise', Makavejev's 'WR: Mysteries of the Organism', and Fassbinder's 'The Third Generation'. Godard of course used a lot of intertitles and bold text in his Nouvelle Vague period. I guess I was thinking in terms of propaganda and its aesthetics and the whole notion of agit-prop. But I was also thinking very directly of the current cable news channels like CNN and Fox, which bombard the audience with all kinds of texts and graphics at all times. You have the anchor speaking, plus the ticker-tape news headlines running along the bottom, plus the chyron to read, as well as charts and other graphics all going on at the same time. Audiences today are much more used to taking in a lot of information, and most of our reading is done on screens now, so I wanted the movie to reflect that.

AK: The film seems to be the resultant clash of expression and raw material, your vision and the varying talents of the actors you use, which seems quite Warholian in its honesty or brutality of approach: you show how artificial the medium is through the stilted interaction between the actors, the dubbed sections of speech, etc. I know that you have consciously invoked Warhol previously (in 'Super 8 1/2' for example) why is he such an influence and where else is he in 'The Raspberry Reich'?

BLAB: Warhol and Paul Morrissey's movies have always been a big influence on me. I just like the whole Factory mentality, and the naivety and crudeness of it. I like the fact that they were mirroring the Hollywood system and indulging in the same sort of excesses but at the same time exposing its phoniness and artificiality. I reference Warhol directly or indirectly in all my movies. Even in 'Skin Flick' the cameltoe kitchen sequence is meant to be kind of Chelsea Girlish. As far as the acting goes, I guess it just comes off as Warholian because I mainly use non-actors and porn stars and put them in sexually depraved situations. I prefer bad acting or self-conscious acting to the kind of overly emotive, cloying yet supposedly naturalistic style of modern Hollywood. I actually think that for porn actors, who are never asked to do any real acting, the guys in my movies have done pretty well. In 'The Raspberry Reich' in particular they had some very complicated dialogue to deal with. Of course I did dub four of them with the voices of actual actors. I also tend to shoot against flat surfaces a lot in that kind of flat, studio style that Warhol had. I just really love the way those movies look.

AK: As neither a sex flick nor a politically informed avant-gardist experiment, the film falls into that most intangible of categories -- 'art'. Is this intentional? Also, you seem to be attempting to divide and conquer your audience, so, via late capitalist, administered world speak -- who is your audience?

BLAB: Well, it will be a sex flick. We're putting out a hardcore version to be called 'The Revolution Is My Boyfriend'. And I think it does succeed on some level as a politically informed avant-gardist experiment. I mean, what could be more experimental than the attempt to mix the conventions of pornography with those of agit-prop and the nouvelle vague? Part of the experiment for me was seeing how far I could push a movie with complex political rhetoric as a piece of pornography, and what kind of effect that would have on the audience. It's almost like a lab experiment – how much can you stimulate the mind and the libido simultaneously? So in that sense I'm treating the audience like lab rats. As for the second part of your question, you have to divide and conquer audiences these days. There are such deep recesses of cynicism out there now that you can't naively put forth a straightforward or simplistic version of any subject if you really want to engage an audience. Part of what I think audiences have responded to in the movie is the fact that it deals in contradictions and paradoxes. The audience is ambivalent, doesn't know how to respond. Is the movie sympathetic to the terrorists or ridiculing them? Is the critique of capitalist culture sincere or a parody of stale leftist rhetoric? Does the movie romanticise and long for revolution or regard it as an anachronism? I think it does all of those things.

AK: Patrick, the 'straight homo' captive in Raspberry Reich is happily abused by his captors, a glyph for the clean-cut pink pounded homosexual. This figure seems to get the most of your wrath as a writer/director (in 'Skin Flick', etc), why?

BLAB: I'm not sure this character type gets my entire wrath. After all, in 'The Raspberry Reich' he ends up one of the only real outlaws, so he's redeemed in that sense. In fact, all of my movies are about characters who don't necessarily identify as gay but who nonetheless participate in homosexual sex quite enthusiastically. I think it's more about rejecting identity politics and the idea of conforming to certain standards of behaviour or aesthetics on the basis of gender or sexual orientation. I think it's also about challenging the complacency of certain people who regard gender or sexual orientation as absolute and fixed. But it's always more complicated than that. The most seemingly "enlightened" skinhead in 'Skin Flick', for example – he "seems to take the woman's point of view", and acts more civilised – turns out to be arguably the most nasty and homophobic.

AK: You seem to deconstruct the whole obtuse idea of the penis as a weapon of oppression, by making the passive captive a 'top' (this is also true in 'Skin Flick'). This seems to be a running theme in your work, why do you find this scenario so interesting?

BLAB: To be honest, this is often just a quirk of working within the porn industry. When casting a porn movie, you have to take into consideration the chemistry between the actors, who's a top, a bottom, or versatile, and who wants to fuck whom. We try as best we can in casting to match the actors to the characters in order to accommodate active and passive roles, but it doesn't always work out that way. So if the actor in real life is more comfortable fucking or being fucked, I sometimes allow them to do so even if it may seem to contradict the motivation or desires or situation of the character in the narrative. But of course I like this kind of counter-intuitivity. It just shakes up people's expectations. Someone told me recently that I also tend to have characters in my movies go bottomless rather than topless, i.e. wear a shirt with nothing on below. This is also disconcerting for an audience because it's so unusual and unexpected. They don't know where to look.

AK: There seem to be no way out for the characters in 'The Raspberry Reich', they flee from one oppressive system to another. The closest they get to freedom is Hamburg! Do you see any escape, any political and existential liberation?

BLAB: Well, yes, I suppose there's the 'Revolution of Everyday Life', the name of the book that I quote from in the movie. I think the most important kind of revolutionary impulse is to resist all sorts of oppression and conformist behaviour on an everyday level as much as possible. I guess for some people that's what being an artist means, although today there's no shortage of corporate-minded artists who have very little revolutionary impetus, or even originality. But I'm always fighting my own limitations and trying to question authority and conventional wisdom and different kinds of hegemony. The hegemony of time, for example, or of limited, ordered consciousness. It's hard, though. I don't have much faith in the political system, that's for sure.

AK: 'The Raspberry Reich' revels in the glamorisation of crime and the political revolutionary, terrorism even. This seems to be an aesthetic choice, so where do ethics fit into this, if at all?

BLAB: I am fond of crime and revolution. Although I'm having an affair with a Cuban exile who doesn't have much time for the notion of Marxist revolution, for example. He's a babalu, a kind of priest of Santeria, which is actually a very subversive religion. But I've always had the romantic notion that homosexual is criminal, and that the very act of homosexuality can or should be regarded as a revolutionary act, or, if you play your cards right, even an act of terror. Homosexual panic runs deep in all cultures, even now. And of course crime directed against corporations or corrupt officials is always glamorous. And in terms of terrorism, it's hard to argue against the claim, as in my movie, that the arrogance of the strong will be met by the violence of the weak. As Angela Davis says on the soundtrack of 'No Skin Off My Ass', embracing the philosophy of non-violence is like embracing the philosophy of suicide. I'm not sure if I subscribe to that, but I know what she means.

AK: With the supposed melodramatic death of the author and the fragmentation of the text's truth content, it seems naïve to assume (deconstructive theories tell us) that any filmmaker or artist is merely projecting their beliefs or fantasies at the canvas or screen. Yet, by writing the dialogue in RR in such a stylised way, by appropriating such large quotations, the actors become ideologues, the auteur's puppets. Where does Gudrun stop and Bruce begin?

BLAB: That's a good question, and an impossible one to answer. All I know is, I didn't realise how much I am like Gudrun until after I'd travelled around with the movie for a while and watched it many times. When I was a punk, I used to run into all kinds of supposedly radical punks who thought they were anarchists or revolutionaries but who still managed to be homophobic and even get violent with me if I was too pushy or vocal with my sissy antics. Out of revenge I and my dyke friends would sometimes get them drunk and make them take their clothes off and put them in homosexually compromising positions and take pictures of them and put them in our fanzines. While watching my movie once I realised that in a way that's what Gudrun does – she uses homosexuality for a kind of political purpose, or to make a point. So I guess Gudrun and I are a lot alike. Gudrun also preaches sexual radicalism but doesn't go too far in practising it herself, something that I can also personally identify with. I still have my hang-ups and sexually repressed tendencies. But I'm trying to overcome them.

www.theraspberryreich.com

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How to live when the war comes home
Paul Chatterton

Being a 'Loiner' (someone form the city of Leeds) I have had first hand experience of the neighbourhoods which the world's attention turned to briefly in early July. In my school days I lived in Beeston, home to two of the London suicide bombers, in a large Victorian end terrace near Cross Flats Park. I often visited South Leeds fisheries for fish supper on a Thursday, long before Mahmood Khan, the Edgware Road suicide bomber, worked there. I had a paper round, delivering the Yorkshire Evening Post at the local newspaper shop, run by an Asian family and worked and socialised with many young friends from Asian families. My days after school were filled with hanging out with the kids of the area, Asian and white. We would cruise the streets in my mini metro, playing a mixture of bangra and techno after the summer of love in 1990.

I now live in Hyde Park, the location of Alexandra Grove and the house which was suspected to have been the infamous bomb making factory. That hot Tuesday, 12th July, I sat in my bedroom-cum-study redrafting a piece of writing for a journal, mildly distracted by the incessant buzz of police helicopters nearby. Life in inner city Leeds had made me immune, almost, to such noises. The link was not made until later that day when I wandered down to make a cup of tea and turned on the national news to hear that not five minutes away 600 people had been evacuated from their homes following the discovery of a suspicious substance during a police raid on a house. The house on Alexandra Grove, near the fruit and veg shop where I often pick up groceries, rented by Magdi al-Nashar the Leeds University Chemistry student and through him to one of the London suicide bombers, is still under 24 hour police surveillance and ominously obscured with black plastic hanging from scaffold.

I am not writing this to shed some light on the links between communities like Hyde Park or Beeston and the acts of the bombers. Let's face it. They could have come from dozens of other deprived inner city areas in the UK with high concentrations of people with south Asian origins. It is impossible to understand the motivations of one, or in this case four individuals from Leeds who chose to take their, and others, lives. We use labels like 'Islam' and fundamentalism' but we will never be certain. The reasons were complex and manifold, and different in each case. It's likely to include push and pull, or internal and external factors – that is to say, immediate concerns of poverty, police harassment and marginalisation in deprived communities, along with wider connections to Religious value clashes and responses to past and ongoing war and colonialism across the middle-east.
So, this piece is not about trying to understand the motives of the bombers. But we can make some attempt to understand ourselves and where we are positioned. Hence, this is series of reflections about our role in perpetuating a particular moral way of life in the UK. When discussing our lives many things are usually left unsaid. I want to discuss them here. It is about (re)learning to live when the war comes home.

Relearning history and a sense of place

First, it is worth saying that the war never really went away. It has always been here. It takes different forms in different times and places. A critical rereading of history in a local area normally reveals a very different story to that which we receive. When we look back over the last 250 years of industrial capitalism, historical examples abound of people who were killed and were prepared to kill to protect their ways of life, or at least turn to violence when their backs were up against the wall. In Leeds for example, in 1664 the decapitated heads of two men charged with plotting a republican uprising were skewered on spikes in the middle of Briggate, now the main shopping street and home to the premier retail outlet Harvey Nichols. In 1734 several people were shot by soldiers on this same street after rioting broke out at the introduction of road tolls. Between 1811-1813, over 40 workers were killed in the Luddite uprisings in Yorkshire where wool croppers attacked the new steam powered factories and their owners, while another 24 were hung and scores deported to Australia.

The 1960s and '70s was a time full of such violence across the world against various enemies such as the state, the capitalist economy and industrial civilisation itself. The Angry Brigade, Britain's first urban guerrilla group, undertook a series of bombings against embassies, politicians and banks and claimed in one of their communiqués that 'we are ready to give our lives for our liberation'. These were strong words. Although nobody was killed, four people were eventually sentenced for 'conspiring to cause explosives'.

Other similar groups in Europe and the USA included the 2nd June Movement, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Bader Meinhoff and the Red Army Faction. Between the 8th and 11th of October 1969 The Weathermen undertook their 'Days of rage', when scores of people rioted through the streets of Chicago, burning and looting, ending in brutal repression by the police. John Ross in his recent book Murdered by Capitalism (2004) highlights how bombing is a quintessentially US pursuit. In the development of US society, ever since the Haymarket bombings during the struggle for the eight-hour day in Chicago, bombing has become a commonplace way for people to fight back at an uncaring system. The same rang true in Britain. Bombings have been a long part of British radical and labour history. They are part of a long tradition of using violence to fight back at the violence of the state, and the excesses of industrial capitalism. Dynamite, mainly due to its cheapness and availability, became the great leveller for the working classes.

Second, what we can see is that there are always many people angry enough at the current way society is organised, and the violence which the state is prepared to commit, to turn to violence themselves. And many of them are not Muslim or Arab, or African or Asian, or identifiable as different – brown, black, swarthy. They were and are, more worrying for governments, normal looking white people. They are the enemy within – ordinary people faced with few choices but violence in the name of self preservation. It normally takes longer to identify such people. Their radicalism undermines the liberal consensus that peace can be obtained as long as the number of outsiders or foreigners in a country can be minimised.

Third, the terrible problem is that in acts of bombing which are random and aim to cause maximum impact, innocent people, or at least those further away from political and monetary power, die, and the guilty, or those closer in proximity to positions of power, usually live. What separates the recent bombings in London with those of the Angry Brigade in the 1970s for example, is that the latter consciously sided with the oppressed in the UK and abroad and planted bombs which targeted the institutions of British power, while the former were prepared to kill people randomly to create a mass event. In the bombing campaign of the Weather Underground in the USA in the 1970s, they promised 'responsible terrorism' and 'principled violence', killing no-one but themselves accidentally while making bombs. The stakes have risen and now targeted killing is not enough. Mass random killings such as those in New York, London and Madrid may be an attempt to say that there is no such thing as non-complicity in the global web of violence, especially if your government chooses to support war in the middle-east.

Fourth, we assume that peace is the norm, when really our state of peace rests on violence and the use of force elsewhere – Bolivian tin mines, Indonesian sweat shops, structural adjustment policies across the developing world, oil and gas pipelines which are built through communities, to name a few. This works on a global and local level – Britain is more peaceful than Sudan, while the suburbs of north Leeds are indeed more peaceful than the inner city areas south of the city like Beeston.

Finally, we are surrounded by violence in our daily lives, but have largely become blind to it. A simple list would include: passing dozens of homeless people, Big Issue sellers and buskers without comment; black and Asian youth being 'stopped and searched' by the police; the deaths of over 1000 people in police custody between 1969 and 1999; the 300 people who die at work every year in the UK due to corporate negligence; asylum seekers being deported or living in squalid housing; the absence of under 16 year olds in city centre due to curfew orders; and isolated and impoverished people living on decaying housing estates. The latest example is an absence of mass civic uproar at the shameful execution of the Brazilian student Jean Charles de Menezes by the London Metropolitan Police due to a case of mistaken identity the day after the attempted bombings of July 21st.
Violence also happens slowly in our cities so we don't notice it. A road may cut through a wildlife area, council housing is cleared for new loft apartments, rents increase pushing small traders out of city centres. Day to day, this violence cannot be heard, smelt or seen. Only after decades do we realise what violence we have been and continue to be subjected to. We may ask ourselves, why did that happen? How could we have let that happen? Why do we not speak out or legislate against any of this, at least enough to bring about real change? But cause and effect have been broken by the passage of time and the complexity which holds together modern day society.

So how do we understand violent acts in our society? The histories of our cities have always been punctured with violence – both from those struggling against the state, and subsequent reactions from the state to quell dissent. We have to deal, then, with many different types: ongoing or everyday violence, which is state-sanctioned and flows daily out of the very nature of our social and economic system; non-state sanctioned violence undertaken by individuals or groups but which is targeted at specific parts of the system through attacks on property, institutions, politicians and elites; and finally the more recent random violence which targets indiscriminately to maximise effect, panic and shock value, highlighting along the way that there can be no innocents. None of these kinds of violence stem from irrational thinking. They variably stem from frustration, marginalisation, desperation or a sense that one is morally right or superior. I do not want to condone violence, and so it is worth noting some differences here: state-sponsored violence is largely imposed by a minority on a majority and hence has little legitimacy, while 'targeted' violence by disrupting the system and minimising the loss of innocent life, may have more legitimacy than 'random' violence which aims to shock and panic with little regard to human life. In all cases, we need a much clearer understanding of what we mean by legitimacy, complicity and innocence.

Towards a self-managed, peaceful society

So where does this leave us? We seem trapped between the historical inter-relations of religious fundamentalists, capitalist governments, corporate control and repressive legislation – however expressed as a 'with us or against us' duality. So how can peace flourish?

Building a peaceful society means several things: First, it means challenging many sources of violence and acknowledging the violence which our society is built upon. Some of them are known to us through the mainstream media – that of religious and political extremists (of many different hues). Others are much less known to us – the terror, killings and deportations which our very economy and global empire needed for its take-off, the violence of industrial capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies that continue to kill and deprive in the name of profit and consumer comforts. Almost every act of consumption has in some way become an act of violence against someone or something – through environmental destruction, use of scarce resources, worker exploitation and transport pollution.

Second, it also means regarding wars, violence stemming from economic policies and terrorism as moral equivalents, and being prepared to stand up against all of them. The sorrow of the politicians towards the London dead seems hollow in the face of their complicity in continued deaths across the world, but most recently in Iraq. George Monbiot recently discussed in The Guardian (9/8/05) the need for an internationalist morality with which to combat a dangerous patriotism in the UK bordering on racism, and valued humans equally regardless of which country they live in.

Third, we have to learn to act for ourselves, collectively. We do not need people who will kill us indiscriminately to highlight what we need to do. We should have been able to understand this for ourselves. But we haven't. We have to unravel the chains of complicity which connect us to atrocities, and act upon them. Derrick Jensen in his book A Language Older than Words (2000) suggests: 'we don't stop these atrocities, because we don't talk about them. We don't talk about them, because we don't think about them. We don't think about them, because they're too horrific to comprehend.' We all need to take responsibility here – by not relying on easy and reassuring messages from the government and corporate media, and for making more effort to connect with those around us.

We also need to do more to highlight our non complicity in global systems of violence. This would include everyday acts like changing our consumer habits, to more connected attempts at civil disobedience which involve challenging arms traders and war makers, resisting global institutions such as the World Bank, corporate profiteers, or companies who strip resources from developing countries. The list is unfortunately quite long.

A week after the bombings there were peace marches in both Beeston and Hyde Park. In Hyde Park 400 people gathered and walked the local area chanting 'peace and unity in our community.' The crowd was as diverse as hoped for and the chant was the invention of the local school children rather than the dogma of a local socialist group eager to use the event as a recruitment drive. A number of speeches at the end, one from a central local figure in the 'Mothers Against Violence' campaign, stressed the need for peace and understanding rather than division. Time will tell but the streets of Hyde Park remain quiet, partly due to the absence of the 10,000 strong body of students who live there during the university term. But this community, like many others, is competent enough to heal its own wounds; to manage itself through the resources of its people, rather than through draconian government anti-terror legislation.

There are no good and bad bombs. Most veterans from militant groups look back with anguish and regret at their violent pasts. Perhaps targeted violence stemming from desperation is understandable. But it is not justifiable – drawing lines around the innocent and the guilty is morally difficult. However, unconditionally advocating non-violence is as foolish as trying to defeat the state and its corporate masters through violence. In some situations, violence (including that to property) is a useful last resort to stopping greater violences around us. Groups across the world draw a line in the sand to protect themselves from the excesses of neoliberalism and colonialism. Otherwise they are likely to be steamrollered by current political and economic policies. The Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico, the Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina, the Soweto Anti-Privatisation Forum, and the Free Papua Movement spring to mind, to name but a few. In the face of ecocide and genocide how can we not occasionally turn to violent outbursts to stop conditions from at least worsening. I cannot embrace non violence in the face of hypocrisy, lying and murdering from those who claim to represent our best interests in government and commerce.

However, in the long term a more realistic and sustainable approach is well-connected non-compliance in the structures that perpetuate the violence. The lessons of Northern Ireland tell us that dialogue and negotiation can be a solution to terrorism. There is much work to be done before we can connect and enter into dialogue with each other as equals about our complicity without distorting interference from the corporate media and the state. But this is where the hope lies – with the power of ordinary people in their communities to self organise in their desire for greater awareness and peace, not in the lies and acts of violence of religious fundamentalists, big business, the state and corporate media.


Paul Chatterton lectures at the School of Geography, University of Leeds. He is an active campaigner in the city and member of the Common Place, Leeds' autonomous social centre (see www.thecommonplace.org.uk). Email p.chatterton@leeds.ac.uk

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The Faction That Fools the World
Mike Small

This August, the leafy parks of Charlotte Square were once again heaving with the boozy intrigue of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. In the last two years, Director Catherine Lockerbie has opened the festival doors in an attempt to cast aside its image as a precious zone for people in the 'book-biz' and quill-picklers with too much time on their hands.

On 19th August the mood changed, as the Institute of Ideas kicked off one of its Festival slots. 'The Right to be Offensive' was one in a string of its sessions, at £8.00 a pop it was billed as:
"A lively and challenging debate on creativity, freedom, and the law. This year has seen plays stopped by outraged religious protestors and increasing calls for censorship of material deemed offensive. Are we creating a new kind of thought crime? What does this mean for art and free speech? Come and discuss with Richard Holloway, Tim Parks, Dolan Cummings and associate director of the National Theatre, Tom Morris - responsible for Jerry Springer: The Opera." ¹
As the tickets sold-out to the class de bavardage, a less frivolous note emerged. This was about the right being offensive not the right to free speech. This was a stage-managed event, but not one managed by the Book Festival.

The LM Network

The chair of 'The Right to be Offensive' was the Director of the Institute of Ideas, one Claire Fox (also known as Claire Foster), who you may recognise. She's become a bit of a stalwart these days and pops up on Radio 4's Moral Maze, Question Time and elsewhere with a well-worn line in articulate-sounding libertarian patter.

Claire used to be in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which began life as a Trotskyist sect, split from the British Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s. During the '80s they published a magazine called Living Marxism. In the '90s the magazine was rebranded the less ideologically sounding LM, while the RCP had been, officially, dissolved, and the group as such was downplayed. LM was forced to liquidate when they famously lost out over claims that ITN staged a refugee camp in Bosnia to look like a concentration camp ('The Picture that Fooled the World'). And in 2000 or so they resurfaced as the Institute of Ideas and Spiked-online - a website that picks up where they left off - and a dozen or so other fronts. They are all part of what's been dubbed the LM Network, a maze of political activists who have been extraordinarily successful in infiltrating key cultural and political positions in the last few years; mediums for the propagation of a crude modernist libertarianism.

The Left used to be at the forefront of change, technology, progress, LM Network argue, and so they churn out a treadmill of pro forma ideas:
[campaigning] "for example, on gun control (it is a misconceived attack on human liberty), child pornography (legal restraint is simply a Trojan horse for the wider censorship of the Internet), alcohol (its dangers have been exaggerated by a new breed of "puritan"), the British National Party (it's unfair to associate it with the murder of Stephen Lawrence; its activities and publications should not be restricted), the Anti-Nazi League (it is undemocratic and irrelevant), tribal people (celebrating their lives offends humanity's potential to better itself; the Yanomami Indians are not to be envied but pitied), animal rights (they don't have any), and global warming (it's a good thing)." ²

They have been the subject of ongoing rumours about who financially backs them, not least after providing platforms for writers from the corporate think-tanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. This is their territory of the revolutionary today, not the regressive disorganised fools of the anarchist anti-capitalist movement. To be a true revolutionary today you have to be, well, a Thatcherite - as one contributor to an online debate about the LM Network put it:
"I saw Claire Fox of the 'Institute for Ideas' on Politics Today (Andrew Neil's programme) I think it's called, on Wednesday complaining about the amount of 'regulation' inflicted on British business by the government - on the same day that trade unionists and fellow campaigners were holding events to mark Workers Memorial Day in memory of those people killed serving 'British business'." ³

Frank Furedi

LM's drastic swing to the right mirrored the lessons being handed down by the ideological "Godfather" of the RCP / LM Network and star of Channel Four's anti-green series Against Nature⁴, the sociologist Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury.⁵

Perhaps the high point of LM's media intervention, the three hour, prime time series directed by Martin Durkin⁶, targeted environmentalists presenting them as 'the new enemy of science' and as comparable to the Nazis⁷ - they were responsible, the series argued, for the deprivation and death of millions in the Third World - and for which Channel Four had to broadcast a prime-time apology.
Furedi has written for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by those well known communists Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and at one point contacted the big supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex scientific issues".⁸ The transmogrification was complete, from so-called 'revolutionaries' to a corporate libertarianism which can be read propping-up Monsanto in the pages of The Wall Street Journal.⁹

Entryism

While intellectually the Network was singing from the same hymn sheet as the extreme-right, it drew on tactics from the Trotskyist-left, such as "entryism" - infiltrating an organisation to influence its direction. A decade ago the Network initiated a new style of entryism - overnight its members were sharp-suited and organising seminars, hanging out at the ICA.¹⁰ Rather than political parties, the aim was and is to infiltrate think-tanks, media groups, civil society, and they have been remarkably successful - such as LM's former editor Mick Hume having a regular column for The Times.

There have been other remarkable successes, and we're not just talking about ex-lefties doing all right in the media:
Juliet Tizzard is another from the LM Network who works for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research conducted in the UK. Then there's Emily Jackson who is a member of the HFEA committee itself. She co-authors with Dr Ellie Lee on abortion rights and is part of ProChoice Forum network.¹¹ Both Lee and the ProChoice Forum are closely associated with Frank Furedi, Tizzard, Progress Educational Trust¹² et al. At a conference at Furedi's University, Jackson is down as publicly endorsing human reproductive cloning.¹³

As George Monbiot wrote in a letter to the Times Higher Education Supplement:
"Former RCP members control much of the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment. They hold key positions in Sense About Science, the Science Media Centre, the Genetic Interest Group, the Progress Educational Trust, Genepool and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. They have used these positions to promote the interests of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and to dismiss the concerns of the public and non-governmental organisations.

Given that the RCP was a tiny splinter of a Trotskyist subgroup, with just a handful of disciples, given that most of the people who have taken these posts do not have a background in science, and given that the movement has a long history of entryism, its former members' colonisation of these bodies is unlikely to have happened by chance."¹⁴

The Network, grounded in an academic ideological framework provided by Furedi, use the media and various self-created outlets to lambast the 'precautionary principle'. Environmentalism, sustainable development and legal regulation are attacked as holding back humanity and positive change. New technologies, especially biotechnology, and massive industrial development are eulogised.
As one researcher from Lobbywatch - a group that "helps track deceptive PR involving lobbyists, PR firms, front groups, political networks and industry-friendly scientists" - has put it: "The LM network opposes all restrictions on business, science and technology, especially biotechnology."¹⁵

Here is a brief list of some of their front organisations, all of which appear to share the same political outlook, many the same personnel, often the same address and funders:
Africa Direct: denies the genocide in Rwanda
Audacity: argues against any restraints on development, and opposes sustainability
Sense About Science: run by Claire's sister Fiona Fox (or Foster), it supports all forms of biotechnology
Families for Freedom: the risks to children are grossly exaggerated
Feminists for Justice: there should be no laws on date rape
Internet Freedom: no restrictions on paedophilia, race hate etc.¹⁶
Global Futures: a publisher, but only of one author - the RCP's chief theoretician, the sociologist Frank Furedi (aka Frank Richards)
Spiked: Dolan Cummings' online site of more 'controversial views'
WORLDwrite: anti-green gap years and school exchange¹⁷

Lampooning the Regency

The Edinburgh Festival is hardly the place to start espousing censorship. I would defend the right for people to hold views I disagree with; to be as 'offensive' as they like. The LM Network certainly hold a predictable stable of offensive right-wing views on just about everything. My argument is for transparency and openness. The Network present themselves as being beyond politics - and are naively treated by media establishments as such - all the while backing big business and operating covertly through the media to influence opinion.

Lobbywatch has been following the LM Network's ways of working:
"The construction of the events follows a set pattern. Well-known figures, who will help to draw in audiences, are invited to take part in events designed to promote the LM agenda. Invitations to speakers are sometimes made via third parties. The news broadcaster Jon Snow withdrew from an event to which he had been invited by the Royal Society of Arts after realising the IoI's involvement. Snow felt there was a lack of transparency."¹⁸

The panel put together for the Festival by Fox (or Foster, or whatever her name is) included her favourite panellist, friend and colleague from the Institute of Ideas, Dolan Cummings. Cummings is the "research and editorial director" for the Institute, but also pops up at their other outlet, Spiked online. Cummings is another partially reconstructed Stalinist-libertarian sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, who has a nice line in sectarianism.
It's ironic that Fox says on her own website that she "established [the Institute of Ideas] to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint" then packs debates with placemen and stooges.

When asked about the group's involvement in the book festival, Director Catherine Lockerbie responded:
"Claire Fox is a leading media figure taking part regularly in e.g. The Moral Maze and much in demand for press and broadcasting. The Institute of Ideas has worked with the British Museum, the Tate, the Hay festival, the Cheltenham festival, education authorities throughout England and Scotland (in a major schools debating competition, much praised by professionals) and many other leading arms of the establishment. The Edinburgh International Book Festival is a free and open forum for discussion of all kinds of ideas. We do not practise censorship. We uphold freedom of speech."

And so you should, but the question remains, do the organisers or the paying public know the context this 'freedom of speech' takes place in?

The Art of Government

It would be easy to dismiss the LM Network as a peripheral group who operate at a level that is both abstract and removed, but a quick look at just how successful they have been in embedding themselves into key institutions and bodies is telling. Lockerbie's own response to our queries for this article is also revealing. Fox appears on the Moral Maze – the apogee of British broadcast intellectualism – ergo she cannot be questioned.

And their methods are not as odd as first appears. In their previous incarnation as the RCP they were vanguardist and deliberately controversial (a veteran of the Miner's Strike remembers being at a public meeting where they argued for the Miners to be armed). This vanguardism remains – but the agent of change is no longer the industrial working class but the professional media class.

LM Network's approach, and a more than coy lack of openness about funding, has led to constant speculation down the years as to the mysterious backers of these eclectically libertarian hucksters. It remains a mystery, until a researcher strikes lucky and a biotech equivalent of 'Moscow Gold' is unveiled.

Others point out that this is just Frank Furedi's team, that Fox, Hume and Cummings are minions to his intellectual mission, and that the relationship of leader-worship pushes them nearer the crypto-fascist wing than the wired-post-communist one. The perhaps more generous analysis is that they have been sent to discredit the left in Britain at a time when the anti-capitalist movement gathers strength and intellectual credibility. This analysis argues that they have been doing such for the last twenty years.

On an purely intellectual level, theirs is the defence of a 'Long Enlightenment' (Furedi strongly defends the humanist subject, industrial progress, the commitment to absolute standards of judgement, etc.) and this leads them into the same camp as the French, New Right theorist Alain de Benoist's theory of a heroic Enlightenment, where the priority of the subject is all and the struggle of self-determination and respect for 'European' values is central.

Other companions at this end of the lounge are such fellow travellers as Roger Scruton - oddly often posed as the right to Claire Fox's left on the Moral Maze. Reviewing Furedi's 'Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?' (to which one is tempted to reply probably to act as apologists for the biotech industry) he writes:
"For Furedi the growing contempt for objective truth and transmissible knowledge is the sign of a deeper malaise within society - a loss of trust in rational thought and a flight towards "social inclusion", where this means, in effect, mob rule. The philistinism of educational theory, the take-over of the humanities by the "postmodern" charlatans, the loss of respect for science, and the growing tendency to put "relevance" at the heart of the curriculum - all these are signs, for Furedi, of a fundamental repudiation of knowledge. And this explains the vanishing of the intellectuals."¹⁹

Well it's not a bad summation of Furedi's slightly weird set of straightjacket, push-button 'theories', though of course they become increasingly tendentious as his coterie straddles the curriculum, the educational theory, the humanities, etc. They say you're known by the company you keep and Scruton's lavish reviews make the LM Network known as a dangerous right-wing group. Scruton goes on to argue that Furedi is not really an intellectual just a "genuinely educated (and transparently conservative) man." Intellectuals you see, "as we know from the cases of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Sartre, Pol Pot and a thousand more ... are dangerous."²⁰ I'm not sure I'd have thrown poor old Jean Paul Sartre in with Pol Pot, but there you go.

Whatever their ideological backdrop, it is disingenuous for them to present themselves as beyond left and right and woefully naïve of the book festival organisers and key political and media outlets to invite them to run the show whilst ignoring their clear political agenda. The LM/RCP Network - perhaps only championed by our own neo-cons - are the arch entryists of our era. So if the debate seemed oddly familiar at the Book Festival this year, at least you know why.


Notes
1. www.edbookfest.co.uk/whatson/event_listing.html?event_id=16136
2. Monbiot, 1/11/1998, Far Left or Far Right? www.monbiot.com/archives/1998/11/01/far-left-or-far-right/
3. www.urban75.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-74676.html
4. www.monbiot.com/archives/1997/11/26/crimes-against-nature/
www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=39&page=D
5. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frank_Furedi
6. www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=39
7. www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,341054,00.html#article_continue
8. Frank Furedi, 1999. Courting Mistrust: The hidden growth of culture of litigation in Britain, Centre for Policy Studies, London. www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/12/09/invasion-of-the-entryists/
9. 'Succumbing to Green Scare Tactics' by Frank Furedi, The Wall Street Journal Europe, November 1998
10. www.infopool.org.uk/cclubs.htm
11. www.prochoiceforum.org.uk
12. www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=160
13. www.spinwatch.org/plog/index.php?blogId=8
14. www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=52&page=1 Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 February 2005
15. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Biotechnology
16. www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=30
17. www.worldwrite.org.uk/
18. www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=142
19. Roger Scruton, The Times, 4 September 2004, www.frankfuredi.com/intellectualreviews.shtml
20. ibid

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Breaking Cover
Tom Jennings

In 'Same Difference?'¹ I discussed recent cinematic treatments of Western Muslim lives in terms of the interaction of racism and Islamophobia with conflicts around class, generation and gender. This essay follows some of the implications in investigating the significance of the hijab (headscarf), which is the focus of considerable current attention. Work by artists related to the veil and identity is briefly summarised in terms of how European Muslim women see and present themselves, and two recent photographic exhibitions tackling this subject are described. However, Muslim women's appearance is a site of intense official interest too. Earlier this year Shabina Begum (16) of Luton overturned the attempt by Denbigh High² to prevent her from wearing the hijab at school. Her principled campaign set a UK legal precedent, but circumstances are less favourable in France, where right-wing racism has made considerable inroads into local government and national guidelines seeking to outlaw the veil conjoin cultural prejudice with secularism and feminism. A recent BBC documentary on the ban's implementation shows the varying meanings invested by young women in these cultural symbols under threat. The concluding section finally seeks to draw together all of the strands from 'Same Difference?' and the present work, indicating how the social and political processes at work should be familiar to us all, even if the specifics of their impact upon the experiences of European Muslims are as deep, diverse and distinctive as the influence of religion – or any other cultural tradition – always is.

Veiled Assertions

The traditions and practices of veiling are widely divergent across the Muslim world³ thanks to variations in religious interpretation, political and economic conditions and the geographical migration of populations leading to degrees of adjustment and assimilation into host societies.⁴ In European countries in particular, "numerous and often contradictory intersecting points of cultural identification"⁵ result. However, the 'ethnicity' discourse which has overlain old-fashioned biological racism yields new British stereotypes of 'alien' Islam, whereby "groups previously known by national or regional origin ... are now all seen as part of a single Muslim community. This categorisation of minority communities in primarily religious terms assumes them to be internally unified, homogeneous unities with no class or gender differences or conflicts."⁶ The underlying complexity is epitomised by several British-based women artists from Muslim backgrounds who have explored the meanings of the veil, including Jananne Al-Ani (Iraqi/Irish descent), Zenib Sedira (Algerian-French) and Sabhera Bham (British-Indian).

To Fran Lloyd, "the Arab woman's body is central to Orientalist imagery as the site of this extreme difference or otherness: of eroticism combined with passivity and anonymity, and as a sign of the unknown to be conquered".⁷ Zenib Sedira's photography and video installations treat "the veil as external sign of difference, social positioning, gender, desire and exclusion/inclusion ... a complex symbol that carries a multiplicity of frequently shifting and often contradictory meanings in differing postcolonial geographies".⁸ Sabera Bham sees the veil as central to images of Muslim women in mainstream media – the most visible aspect which differentiates them from others. Her Concealed Visions – Veiled Sisters (1998) projected portraits of veiled women onto suspended transparent fabric, with a soundtrack of British women voicing how the veil expresses their modesty, dignity and self-respect.⁹

The richness of such work reveals the range of attitudes amongst Muslim women; while many not wearing the veil appreciate that others incorporate it symbolically in conceiving personal identity. Veiling "is a specific practice of situating the body within the prevailing exigencies of power; so is unveiling ... Not-to-veil is also another way of turning flesh into a particular type of body,"¹⁰ so that choices around the veil do not necessarily or directly concern either religion or oppression. These complexities should be kept in mind in considering the exhibitions described below concerning representations of British Muslim women. Though mostly of Pakistani descent, their portrayals amply demonstrate as wide a range of concerns and perceptions in relation to appearance, conduct, self and society as would be found among women in the UK of any cultural background.

1. Self Presentation

Like Sabhera Bham's installation cited above, Clement Cooper's Sisters¹¹ combined photography with testifying voices. This exhibition and book intended to give a positive public representation of young UK Muslim women,¹² and had the backing of teachers and imams in state and Islamic colleges, schools and mosques in Preston, Oldham, Manchester and Birmingham, as well as the enthusiastic participation of those who volunteered in groups to take part. After extensive consultation with their parents, subjects were asked to wear their 'best' or favourite scarves,¹³ and pictures were shot between lessons in normal school sites. Locations and props were used according to aesthetics and convenience; other members of the school going about their business were present along with chaperones; and the subjects decided on their stance and gaze. The best images technically of each were shortlisted, and those used decided jointly with the subjects – the final selection representing the diversity of styles and postures adopted by the girls.

For the sound recordings, they were asked to speak about whatever they felt comfortable with in terms of their lives or beliefs as Muslims; given a list of suggested themes (including religion, the hijab, 9/11, prejudice experienced); and taboo themes such as divorce and sexuality were tacitly avoided to maintain comfort levels. The editing reduced repetition while representing the range of opinions expressed, keeping some of the naïveté and embarrassed laughter but doing justice to the subjects' efforts to present themselves publicly.¹⁴ Most explicitly characterised themselves primarily as part of family and social networks or communities – those from Islamic schools being more self-confident about their position within Muslim traditions and religion; while state school students preferred to describe how they personally and collectively behaved and were treated as Muslims.

Given the briefing's emphasis on women's clothing and 'Muslim' ideas and behaviour, many of the statements discussed feminine roles and morality and women's freedoms and status in Islam. However, it is noticeable that a very wide spectrum of attitudes was audible and visible, whether or not any pressure was felt from authority figures which may have impacted on what the girls said and did. In the pictures the gaze is to camera more often than averted, and the facial expressions and poses struck indicated feelings of being strong, sassy, secure, coy, defiant, vulnerable, knowing, proud, happy or challenging. Tones of voice included the forthright, hesitant, authoritative or thoughtful in criticising, justifying, demystifying, moralising, questioning, declaiming, complaining and explaining. Certainly, interpretations of domesticated, docile downpression on the part of these modern European young women would be hard to sustain irrespective of the degree of their piety, traditional observance of veiling, or modesty of expression.

2. Self Expression

Of course, the public collective identity of the Sisters was predetermined as Muslim and symbolised by the veil. Though necessary for the project's purposes, this hindered the expression of other dimensions in the exploration of selfhood which might resonate with the experiences of viewers in different ways. The NMPFT exhibition After Cameron¹⁵ also contains portrayals of a group of British Muslim women. These self-portraits were produced collectively but with no prescribed attention paid to the ethnic or cultural background of the subjects, and therefore no 'burden of representation' was placed upon them. With a stress on private and personal development rather than public presence, this provides an interesting contrast.

After Cameron was intended to introduce the work of Julia Margaret Cameron to a wider audience. Cameron was a pioneering Victorian photographer belonging to a colonial family in India, and therefore constrained by a variety of technological and social restrictions. In a series of workshops with artist Chris Madge, the subjects experimented with nineteenth century pinhole camera and contemporary digital methods, and the corresponding old and new processing and developing techniques were combined culminating in the final argyrotype prints. This was decisively not 'instant' photography. Time needed to be taken for trial and error, and therefore for reflection. And while the digital camera captures moments, its autofocus technology renders the point of focus uncertain; whereas the pinhole camera's longer exposure time gives flexibility in discovering possibilities for staging, movement and definition.

Judging by the results, the Bradford group were just as self-confident as the Sisters, evidenced in their sophisticated deployment of concepts and tropes of Western and Eastern beauty, familiarity with conventions of fashion photography, the self-consciousness of display and careful manipulation and playing with Asian and European clothing as well as other culturally iconic props. The expressions, postures and gestures tend towards introspection, with permutations of sadness, poignancy, yearning, amusement and joy as well as modesty, seriousness and stillness – but the pictures are also dynamic and dialogic, with double images and blurring from movement, and interaction between subjects as well as implied communication with viewers. The freedom to vary framing, lighting and camera angles further allowed the depth and complexity of character and mood to be conveyed.

The final ensemble of images captures the richness and provisionality of both personal identity and artistic endeavour as social processes rather than purely individual enterprises. Several of the group had even decided not to allow their pictures into the public domain (due to concerns about possible unauthorised use); though they participated just as fully as the others in the project. After Cameron emphasised the cultivation of a cohesive group environment to help overcome inhibitions as well as fostering shared decision-making. Rigid boundaries of both authorship and selfhood were thus comprehensively questioned in the portraits, which were selected for exhibition to represent a record of the learning and achievements of the group as well as the self-images of its members – who in the event largely relinquished the veil as a marker of identity while generally also choosing to avert their gaze.

3. Self Defence

The putative 'mystery' of Muslim women is enhanced by traditional practices of modesty only to those with no direct experience (whether through choice or circumstance). On the other hand, the postmodern Western obsession with superficial displays of surface appearance leads to suspicion towards any kind of hidden depths which have the capacity to expose it as the narcissistically trivial but commodifiable perversity it is. Either way, it should be apparent from the work described above that the characterisation of Muslim women as undifferentiated victims of their culture is a travesty, even if that doesn't hinder its utility in the pursuit of sundry vested interests. These reproduce the generally regressive and racist tendencies of nationalism and other exclusionary discourses corrosively festering away in the body politic, but also often intersect with more urgent contemporary ramifications for everyday lives when powerful institutions weigh in. The Headmaster and the Headscarves details how young women are being forced right now to deal with the practical consequences of institutional definitions of their difference.¹⁶

In a state secondary school in Paris, headmaster Raymond Scieux translated the French government's outlawing of 'religious symbols' by insisting on the visibility of his female pupils' ears and foreheads – his primary rationale being that his staff shouldn't have to be aware of their religion. The teachers themselves justified the ban on the veil in quasi-feminist terms of the girls' welfare (rather than their own) – including protecting them from religious 'oppression' by their families and, bizarrely, the importance of encouraging teenage sexual expression. Such clumsy rationales satisfied neither their more thoughtful colleagues nor the students featured in the documentary. Many of their parents had already urged them to relinquish their veils for the sake of education, and (like the Sisters), they recognised the sexualisation of youth to be toxic. They may have held sharply diverging perspectives on the status of 'Western' cultural patterns in their daily lives, and most were not particularly devout, but Muslim customs now under attack were felt as integral to their personal identities.

In the meetings and discussions shown in the film, those supporting the government guidelines systematically refused to listen to or take into account the girls' feelings, opinions and wishes, or even to engage in real debate. Facing such patronising intransigence, the prospect of expulsion just before their final exams understandably tinged the atmosphere among the girls and their supporters with a mixture of indignance, misery and fatalism.¹⁷ However, some began to crystallise their intelligence and integrity into increasing determination and militancy as they grappled with strategies of minimum compromise to maintain self-respect. In this they drew on various social and cultural influences – including the history and steadfastness of parental generations, the self-respect inherent in Islam, pragmatic experience at school so far and an immersion in secular youth culture (such as in appropriating the bandana from hip hop style). Responding to an invidious predicament, their imaginative questioning of the wider social and political implications led to almost palpable intellectual, cultural and spiritual maturation – completely contradicting their erstwhile educational protectors, whose rhetorical claims of benevolence disrespectfully denied them any such capacity.¹⁸

Rhetorics of Respect and Respectability

Liberal reformist writers and activists within Islam explain the resistance to change in its traditionalist patriarchal models by analysing the Qur'an and pre- and post-Islamic legislation, customs and scholarship.¹⁹ Emphasis is placed on the historical, cultural and political conditions influencing the interpretation of scripture, the development of Shari'a law, and applications in specific circumstances. Humanist rationalism is apparently also rapidly gaining ground among intellectuals and the political classes in many important Islamic countries.²⁰ However, a conspicuous failure to speak to poor and young Muslims offers hardline political Islam the chance to thrive – not just in the war zones of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Europe. Similarly in Iran, recent presidential elections were won through a tactical appeal to the economic desperation of the poor and against 'corrupt' urban middle class interests.

Surveys of patterns of beliefs and behaviour within and between Muslim communities and societies throughout the world²¹ show that the most significant variables may not relate directly to religion either. The points of tension producing intellectual challenge, deliberate struggle or subversive response to necessity mean that women are often active against patriarchal restriction in ways corresponding to neither modernist, traditionalist or fundamentalist Islamist prescriptions nor Western liberal or feminist presumptions. So, despite this wide spectrum of lived practice (especially when harsh economic conditions dictate), Chandra Mohanty's examination of the rhetoric of women's solidarity shows that "British Asian cultures, in which a wide range of different types of people are living lives in which they are active agents not just passive victims, become reduced to monolithic, stereotyped and ethnocized categories such as the 'Asian community' ... characterised by its victim status – victim often not only of white racism but of a set of so-called traditional norms and values."²² Such patronisation is typically compounded with moral panics about 'barbaric' customs such as honour killing and female circumcision irrespective of their real prevalence.

When hyperbolized in this way, the general haste to condemn women's subordination as blanket oppression carries the corollary that any apparent complicity – such as conformity to tradition – may be dismissed as the docility of the slave. The corresponding trivialisation of efforts from within Muslim communities to improve conditions for women then matches the general arrogance of Western discourses in relation to those of 'inferior' peoples. It also conveniently overlooks the cultural specifics of tradition. In the defensive conditions of historical domination, tradition is centrally concerned with 'proper' femininity – which "is always over-layered with other categorizations such as class and race. Historically ... working-class women (Black and White) ... were precisely what femininity was not. However, to claim respectability, disavowal of the sexual is necessary and constructions, displays and performances of feminine appearance and conduct are seen as necessary [ ... ] masquerades [which are] tactical deployments of forms of femininity which protected their investments and gained cultural approval and validation."²³

Not surprisingly then, Britain's South Asian communities are, according to fictional depictions, riddled with "forms of oppression that relate to caste, class and religion as well as the positive aspects of family and community ... Women and girls, in particular, are subject to irreconcilable contradictions ... What is called for is a life of negotiation that leads to a redefinition of boundaries."²⁴ This continual negotiation to prove worth contrasts pressures towards conformity from within one's family, wider kinship networks and community, with those from unofficial and official racism. None of this can be understood in simplistic terms of static culture, ethnic and race relations or patriarchy – which fix identity in mass, categorical differences clamouring to be recognised. And for those lacking the economic or cultural status needed "to participate in recognition politics ... ethical struggles often occur around use- rather than exchange-values ... Communities [form themselves through] talk of fairness and kindness that glues people together and is based on values of care rather than exchange." ²⁵ This type of social orientation resists the "tyranny of identity politics",²⁶ whether imposed by grass-roots essentialism, institutional discourse or governmental 'political correctness'.

As with the Bradford groups defending those criminalised after the 2001 riots, the campaign in France against the school headscarves ban prominently features working class Muslim women organising from their own perspective in ways not reducible to essentialised separable identities – even if conservative 'community leaders', the state, academics, media and marketers share that agenda to monopolise tradition, 'law and order', knowledge, public opinion, and profit respectively. Likewise, the 1989 demonstrations and Satanic Verses 'book-burning' rituals by British Muslims in Bradford and elsewhere represented "spontaneous working class anger and hurt pride"²⁷ akin to that seen also among alienated Black and white inner-city youth throughout the 1970s and 80s. Whenever material deprivation is dismissed as the fault of the poor, it may become a matter of survival to demand respect in response to its absence. Whether white, Black or Asian, there's nothing 'natural' about these processes – even if this is conveniently forgotten by the complacently respectable. Meanwhile the status as white of 'underclass' working class people on sink estates "is 'tainted' through their multi-ethnic residence, their poverty and their roots in a 'black' market economy"²⁸ along with their thoroughly dangerous conduct and dirty sexuality – echoing previous class-based and colonial discourses of the urban poor, immigrants and racial others used to reinforce distinctions between 'rough' and 'respectable' classes, castes or strata.

From the range of attitudes, preoccupations and expressions in Sisters, After Cameron and The Headmaster and the Headscarves, religious traditions, beliefs and norms are obviously interwoven with manifold other dimensions of contemporary European Muslim women's experiences. Similarly, religious precepts and practices may be mobilised for a range of purposes, and are often neither the problem nor the solution nor even the most salient factors in striving for a tolerable life. Acting collectively to maintain and reproduce self, family and community means continually adjusting to conflicting demands from a panoply of social, discursive and official institutions. These claim uniformity, consistency and legitimacy on the grounds of nation, morality and order, yet are riven by and indeed formed from contradictory historical, political and economic interests. Consequently, codes of respectability which are deeply ambiguous in terms of their race, gender and class connotations collide and overlap within Western societies – among people of all secular and spiritual faiths coping with the consequences of consumerism, selfish individualism and contempt for others.

Meanwhile the hapless hysterical hypocrisy of power pretends it can legislate away all complexity and antagonism while encouraging the intensification of inequality. Such attempts are bound to fail; but the failure itself serves both corporate agendas and the divinely-ordained control freak fantasies concerning moral enforcement and punishment indulged in by New Labour, Islamic fascism and US evangelical support for neoconservative neofeudalism. Resistance of any kind to the relentless march of managed misery is defined as bad for business, inherently dangerous, and evil to boot. Deliberately soliciting knee-jerk public reactions which draw on emotional reserves left over from centuries-old colonial and class stratification, the state legitimises unlimited measures to preempt change. And as with anti-social conduct (including wearing headscarves or hoodies); so too for thought-crime and terror. As Paul Gilroy argues, in the UK:
"outlawing incitement to religious hatred ... was just a convenient governmental gambit for separating 'good' from 'bad' Muslims ... Bolting official religious sensitivity on to the apparatuses of 'antiracism' only helps to reproduce exactly the sort of closed and stratified communities that might otherwise be withering away. Processes, identities and feelings that are fluid, complex and internally differentiated become fixed, naturalised and spiritualised ...
"Transposing large cultural, political and economic problems into the language of faith and religion is a counterproductive oversimplification recycling the 'clash of civilizations' idea ... It is only racism that holds all British Muslims responsible for the wrongs perpetrated in the name of their faith by a tiny minority."²⁹

The heavy-handed and misconceived methods of the rule of law, applied to alien civilisations and yob cultures alike, run the gamut from surveillance, profiling and spurious and malicious 'intelligence' to peremptory discipline and restrictions on movement and eligibility for work, welfare and services – because on prejudicial examination their targets perpetually fall short of fully human (or British) status deserving respect for life and self-organisation. Appreciating – rather than suppressing, denying and projecting – the inevitable shades of sameness and difference within and between us is therefore no mere aesthetic preference for respectably cultured cosmopolitans. Breaking the cover of monolithic universal prescription by understanding, accepting and building from the implications is instead a precondition for any liberatory politics.³⁰

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Notes

1. Variant 23, pp.28-31, Summer 2005.
2. Also, as it happens, my old school.
3. Camillia Fawzi El-Solh & Judy Mabro, 'The Ubiquitous Veil', pp.7-12 in 'Introduction: Islam and Muslim Women', Muslim Women's Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality, Berg, 1994, pp.1-32.
4. Where, "the hybridity generated by diaspora is not just with the 'host' nation but among diasporas themselves ... [from] the historical and continuing interactions between different diasporas, and the increasing frequency with which individuals may inhabit various successive diasporas in the course of a single lifetime" (Nicholas Mitzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture, Routledge, 1999, p.3-4.
5. Fran Lloyd, 'Arab Women Artists: Issues of Representation and Gender in Contemporary British Visual Culture', Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001, p.5.
6. Nira Yuval-Davis, 'Fundamentalism, Multiculturalism and Women in Britain', in James Donald & Ali Rattansi (eds.) Race, Culture and Difference, Sage, 1992, p.263.
7. Lloyd, p.13 (see note 5). For various historical reasons, Arab women may have suffered such perceptions in especially acute form; but a similar syndrome could surely be detected applying to Muslim (or indeed, Asian) women in general.
8. Lloyd, p.6. So, Silent Witness (1995) has a row of large disembodied but actively moving pairs of eyes complicating questions of agency, activity, passivity and modesty, whereas Don't Do To Her What You Did To Me (1996) has large photographs of "the artist veiling and unveiling herself ... The averted gaze of the artist and the veil suggest an image of subjugation, but ... the scarf (which was made by Sedira) is a patchwork of photographs of an unveiled female with her hair down (the artist's sister)" (p.8). Silent Sight (Self-Portrait) (1999) has a triptych of the artist wearing full-length white veil, recalling Catholic and Islamic symbolism blending in her upbringing in Paris.
9. "I wanted to create alternative images of the veil, images that would challenge mainstream conceptions and allow the veil wearers to be able to express themselves": Sabera Bham, quoted in Paul O'Kane, 'Review of Photographic Installation, Concealed Visions – Veiled Sisters, by Sabera Bham', Third Text, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1998, pp. 101-3.
10. Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.115. Note that the Qu'ran does not mention the veil; merely exhorting believers to avoid repeated eye contact with members of the opposite sex.
11. Sisters: A Celebration of British Female Muslim Identity, by Clement Cooper, © KHADiJA Productions, Manchester, 2004 (distributed by Cornerhouse Publications: see www.cornerhouse.org/publications), includes portraits and statements of women from Oldham, Manchester, Preston and Birmingham, including: Aisha Saleem, Ambia Khatun, Ayah Basil Hatahet, Bushra Iqbal, Danya Al-Astewani, Fatima Abdul, Fatima Begum, Hazera Afia Khatun, Henna Jameel (pictured), Johura Begum, Mariam Ghaddah, Meyrish Nasreem (pictured), Nipa Begum (pictured), Rebeka Akhtar, Rebeka Khantun, Romana Sunam, Shahina Khatun, Sobia Bibi and sisters (pictured), Sonia Ahmed and Tasneem Aiar. Sisters exhibited at The Gallery Oldham in 2004-2005 and is now touring internationally. Clement Cooper's previous work includes Presence, looking at life within the African-Caribbean communities of Moss Side and Longsight, Manchester, and Deep: People of Mixed Race, on the experiences of people in Liverpool, Cardiff, Manchester and Bristol. A current UK-wide project entitled Brothers, under the auspices of Autograph: the Association of Black Photographers, will produce portraits of British Muslim men.
12. "They were quite happy to speak about their faith and have their pictures taken. Even the imams went out of their way to help me. I found Muslim women to be intelligent. They were aware of who they were and felt strongly about their beliefs. They had great respect for themselves and respect for others. What I found most amazing was that an eight-year-old girl wearing the hijab knew far more about herself and who she was than her much older white counterparts" (Clement Cooper, interviewed in 'Beauty and the Faith: Girls and their Hijabs', Asian News, 17th December, 2004).
13. In Islamic schools white hijabs were school uniform; dark colours being favoured in state schools. Veil material varied from simple, high-quality cloth to more decorative designs, sometimes prominently featuring fashion brand names (itself a subject of intense discussion). Incidentally, one of the schoolgirls forged her parent's signature for permission to take part, leading to her portrait being temporarily withdrawn. General information regarding the project was provided by Clement Cooper (personal communication, July 2005).
14. From their day-to-day chat many of the girls were also mad about football (though not other sports) and various other 'Western' pursuits; some also routinely discussed 'boyfriends'. In other words, many themes commonplace among British teenage girls were keenly addressed – though only one contributor mentioned leisure pursuits and enjoyment during recording, countering perceptions that being Muslim was boring and serious.
15. After Cameron, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (©), Bradford, 2004 (in association with Bradford Youth Service), including portraits by Billy Ayub, Sylina Sabir, Afiya Hussain, Aaisha Hussain, Salhia Ahmed, Salma Ahmed, Mahmoona Khan and Yasmeen Kosar, working with Chris Madge (see: www.nmpft.org.uk/aftercameron). Further information concerning this project was gained from Chris Madge (personal communication, May 2005).
16. The Headmaster and the Headscarves, dir. Elizabeth C. Jones, screened on BBC2, 29th March 2005, and is set in the Lycée Eugene Delacroix in Drancy, northeast Paris. Note that the history and contemporary repercussions of French colonialism in Africa are rather different from those of the British Empire in Asia (the hijab itself being highly significant in the Algerian independence campaign). However, the Muslim Arab and African presence in France is as firmly established as the South Asian communities are in the UK, with fluctuating patterns of integration and autonomy, tradition and cultural crossover sufficiently parallel in the two countries to merit consideration together – as are the contours and stereotypes of racism and Islamophobia and very substantial levels of deprivation and disaffection.
17. From working class families and poor neighbourhoods, and considering the far more intense degree of institutional racism faced in France even than in Britain, they were keenly aware that their prospects were already highly uncertain. Since the programme was made, school expulsions of French girls refusing to remove their veils have started to accelerate, and an organised campaign against the ban is gaining wide support. Meanwhile hijab bans are planned or are already law in several other European countries, including Germany, Spain and Italy.
18. Whereas submitting meekly would represent the effective accomplishment of the repression their communities are accused of. For some responses from young UK Muslim women to The Headmaster and the Headscarves, see: http://forum.mpacuk.org – including comments that approximate nationalistic pride in asserting that it will never get that bad here. Let's hope they're right (in the prognosis, if not the diagnosis).
19. See, for example, Asghar Ali Engineer, The Rights of Women in Islam (2nd ed.), New Dawn Press, 2004.
20. Such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Morocco, see: Ziauddin Sardar, 'Islam: the Tide of Change', New Statesman, 8th August, 2005.
21. For example. Fawzi El-Solh & Mabro (see note 2).
22. Because "the Western gaze, including the Western feminist gaze, tends to construct Third World 'otherness' in ways that deny the differences and specificity of other cultures": Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Duke University Press, 2003; cited in Chris Weedon, Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging, Open University Press, 2003, p.114.
23. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, Sage, 1997, p.115. See also: Floya Anthias, 'Race and Class Revisited: Conceptualising Race and Racism', Sociological Review, Vol. 38, 1990, pp.19-42; Heidi Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader, Routledge, 1997; and Tracey Reynolds, 'Black Women and Social-Class Identity', in: Sally R. Munt (ed.) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, Cassell, 2000.
24. Weedon, p.114 (see note 22). The material discussed in 'Same Difference?' (see note 1) bears out such conclusions.
25. Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, Open University Press, 2004, p.185, who further stresses that "The significance of loyalty and honour has also been well documented in studies of working-class life". And: "While recognition politics becomes the ground for the middle classes to regroup their interests and investments, attempting to gain the moral and national high ground, other groups shape their ethics differently ... "This is the sort of ethics ... [referring to] that which cannot be used, that which has real integrity; something quite rare in an exchange-value Western world. And it is the rarity of integrity that makes it in such demand, for it is one of the cultural practices which is difficult for the accumulative self to access, the prosthetic self to play with, or the omnivore to taste. Authenticity and integrity are ethical qualities that cannot be easily exchanged; they may be one aspect of cultural capital that cannot be harnessed by those intent on increasing their value at the expense of others" (p.186).
26. A. Sivanandan, 'Fighting Our Fundamentalisms' [interview with Campaign Against Racism and Fascism], Race & Class, Vol. 36, No. 3, 1995, p.80, who explains that identity politics makes it "impossible to examine issues objectively. Your loyalty is already defined by who you are and, therefore, the side you take is already defined, and there is no point in discussing other views on the subject. The debate is foreclosed before it has begun".
27. Tariq Modood, 'British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair', in James Donald & Ali Rattansi (eds.) Race, Culture and Difference, Sage, 1992, p.261. Here the trigger for action concerned religious identity only in the sense that Christians would be similarly outraged if "pissing on the bible" was presented as a "theological argument" (p.269).
28. Anoop Nayak, Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World, Berg, 2003, p.76. This study of attitudes among white working class youth in Newcastle upon Tyne revealed different levels and types of multicultural interaction, including defensive respectability and 'classic' white racism, the imitation or cultivation of elements of 'ethnic' style, and underclass groups whose space and circumstances were shared with Asians and who oscillated between virul