Louise Casey

Last week Louise Casey’s report (PDF) on the long-running issue of grooming gangs, a system of criminality in which young girls are ‘groomed’ through younger boyfriends, plied with alcohol and free food and then trapped so they could be raped by sometimes numerous older men, was published, recommending a national inquiry as the type of gang has appeared in many towns and cities across the UK over several decades. Her report also recommended that mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse by certain professionals be made law and that taxis be regulated strictly locally, with a loophole that allows a taxi driver to be licensed by one authority and then operate in another to be closed, but also that the law on rape be amended such that any sexual activity between an adult and anyone between ages 13 and 15 be classified as rape rather than merely “sexual activity with a minor” (currently that law only applies when the younger party is younger than 13), which I think is a bad idea, but the government announced on Monday evening that they would be making these specific changes to the law demanded in the report. The report notes that the ethnicity of both victims and perpetrators are not reported in a large number of cases, meaning that we cannot tell how many perpetrators are in fact Pakistanis (or other mostly Muslim ethnicities such as Kurds) and how many not. We have seen demands for the deportation to Pakistan of the perpetrators, and even of a mass deportation of British Pakistanis. It seems a lot of people have made up their mind that the problem is simply Pakistanis, or even Muslims, and nothing that comes out of this review will satisfy them if it does not confirm their beliefs.

Who is a Pakistani?

The independent (elected as Reform) MP Rupert Lowe has demanded that perpetrators be deported and that Pakistan could be threatened through the aid he believes they receive from the UK to accept the deportees. The phrase “Pakistani ethnicity” keeps being repeated as if it were the most significant factor. The truth is that Pakistan has six major ethnicities (Sindhi, Muhajir, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pashtun and Baluch) and many smaller ones; the people involved in the gangs could be from any of those, or more than one, but they all have different languages and cultures although they are bound by Islam. More importantly, not every British ‘Pakistani’ actually has any right to Pakistani nationality anymore; there have been two or three generations born here and the younger generation may have no nationality except British. In the case of the actual immigrants, many had been born in British India and thus were not Pakistani for very long and have an unbroken chain of British nationality going back some 300 years. Pakistan is quite within its rights not to take ‘back’ people whose grandparents left the country in the 1960s, who were born in England and went astray in England. This does not mean we should not deport people who are not citizens who commit serious crimes, let alone people who came here on criminal business, but a British citizen is no less British for having committed a crime and this was not a plot hatched in Mirpur or Karachi. Without that principle, citizenship becomes a glorified visa.

The former Clacton UKIP MP Douglas Carswell, now extolling the virtues of the state of Mississippi on YouTube, has posted a call for a mass deportation. That is a ludicrous, unjustified, racist demand; the majority of British Pakistanis are not criminals and some contribute positively to our community. We also should not fall into the trap of assuming that any interracial relationship between a white working-class girl and a Pakistani is a grooming/rape case in the making. Most Pakistanis are normal people, not gangsters, much as most Italians are not mafiosi.

What is and isn’t rape?

I often finding myself explaining to people why the media commonly report on people “having sex” or “sexual relationships” with people under the age of 16 or even 18 which is the age of consent in much of the US. “That’s rape,” they say; “why don’t they call it rape?”. The answer is that until now, the UK reserves the term rape for, well, rape: forcing someone to have sex against their will, or having sex with them when they do not know what is going on because of unconsciousness, being too drunk, or being too cognitively impaired to be able to understand being asked their consent. The law distinguishes between sex which is not legally valid and the total lack of consent, or no attempt to seek it, or the lack of consent being the whole point. The exception is when the younger party is 12 years old or younger: then, it is classed as rape and is a strict liability offence, i.e. defences such as believing they were over 16 do not apply (presumably because a 12-year-old cannot reasonably be confused with a 16-year-old, and will usually be too young to have any desire for sex anyway). This law was only introduced in 2003; until then, rape always meant rape.

David Blunkett boasted that one of his achievements in the last Labour government was the introduction of “statutory rape”. It wasn’t, though. In countries where statutory rape exists in the law, it’s a separate offence from rape. It’s a different name for what we call sexual activity with a minor. Yvette Cooper, the same politician now planning to classify a group as ‘terrorists’ for throwing paint at an aircraft suspected of being used for the Gaza genocide, plans to enshrine a lie into law: that there is no difference between having sex with a willing 15-year-old and raping them. The former may be inappropriate and the adult should know better, and the teenager may be left broken-hearted and feeling used, and there’s a good reason why it is illegal, but it’s not rape. This change in the law will result in an absurd situation: a charge of rape where the victim is an adult will leave no doubt that the victim was forced, while the same term when the victim is an adolescent could mean that no force needed to be used as the ‘victim’ was willing, and an actual rape victim who had been that age at the time might find herself having to explain that fact. Casey (who gets the law wrong in her report: sex with an under-13 is not merely illegal, but is charged as rape on a strict liability basis) claims that the ‘ambiguity’ in the law had resulted in charges being dropped because it appears that the girls had consented, but there was no need for charges to be dropped as sex with a minor is still a crime; it is just not called rape. Some of the cases of charges being dropped or cases collapsing would have been the result of this pattern of offending being new to the legal system; as it becomes better understood, prosecutors know to look for signs of grooming and of grooming gang activity.

Casey calls for protections to be put in place to avoid criminalising consensual relationships between teenagers; in my experience, public attitudes (and the attitudes of feminists in particular) have been getting harsher towards boys in recent years. I have heard feminists online call a relationship between a 17-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl creepy and inappropriate, when this age gap could be as little as a year and half in reality and the two could be only a year apart at school, and insisting that a 15-year-old boy had ‘raped’ a 13-year-old girl because she was 13; his age was irrelevant to them and when I pointed it out, I was called a “rape apologist”. There will be pressure to make any such window as narrow as possible. Such a window should be enshrined in law rather than mere practice; the latter could be overruled if a girl’s family is wealthy or powerful and a boy’s isn’t, for example.

Grooming and racism

There is no doubt that racism has been boosted by the issue of these gangs and also influences the debate. There are people who have been railing against “mass immigration” for some years, and have jumped on this particular issue to prove that “these people” have a culture which is incompatible with “British culture”. The gangs are assumed to be made up of ‘immigrants’ when in fact British Pakistanis go back, as a large community, to the 1950s; when the three young girls were stabbed in Stockport last year, racists jumped on rumours that the attacker was a Muslim, and started a riot. There is an assumption that the rest of the Muslim community knows who is involved and turns a blind eye; in fact, the groomers often operate away from the eyes of the rest of the Muslim community (in the case of Rochdale, for example, much of the activity went on in the predominantly white Heywood area). It is quite different from the culture of sexual abuse in the churches which was known of in the recent past; the abusers are not pillars of the community but low-skilled workers such as kebab shop owners and workers and taxi drivers. Since this behaviour is contrary to Islam on numerous grounds (the supply of alcohol and drugs, coming between girls and their families, the deception involved in giving ‘gifts’ to justify later abuse, sex outside marriage, let alone rape), it should be no surprise that the perpetrators are in a lot of cases not particularly observant. The problem is a particular class of criminals, not a “problem with Islam” or Muslims in general.

Grooming gangs are far from Britain’s only example of a culture of violent misogyny. Young boys freely access pornography on their mobile phones that give the impression that women enjoy being raped, and lap up the drivel of Andrew Tate and other popular misogynists. Social services and police (the latter of which has been notorious for harbouring rapists and domestic abusers in its ranks) turned a blind eye for decades, calling the victims child prostitutes and sometimes criminalising them instead of pursuing the abusers. Yet when a particular group of offenders appear to be mostly Muslims, the default response is that their ethnicity or religion — how they are “different from us” — is the problem rather than that this is how misogyny has manifested itself among the less scrupulous of them. There have in fact been a number of gangs convicted of sexual abuse and other forms of organised modern slavery whose members are not Pakistanis or Muslims, and the same people always shouting about Muslim grooming gangs say nothing when the gang members are white. It’s a bit less complicated when you can’t say their culture is not ours or is not compatible with ours, but if you are only angry when the perpetrators are not white and the victims are, that is a good indication that you are a racist.

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The Madleen, en route to Gaza

Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by saying that the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had changed his view, having defended the campaign until recently, and stating his opinion that Israel had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza in an article for Haaretz. I switched off after a few minutes, having heard Foster’s lecture on why we shouldn’t call it genocide:

The decision of whether someone is guilty of war crimes will always be made in a court, not a radio studio; words like ‘genocide’ are a legal definition of a specific crime, rather than an emotive description of events that upset us, the latter use — incorrect until a judge decides — is increasing. 

I will concede that spurious accusations of genocide happen; we hear it used to refer to actual examples of oppression, such as by Israelis of Palestinians before the actual genocide began, and by racists, such as those who claim “race-mixing is genocide” or that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa right now. However, the use of ‘genocide’ to refer to Israel’s actions are not a mere emotional reaction and nor have they increased recently. Rather, they increased when genocidal actions accompanied by genocidal rhetoric started being relayed to us by Palestinian witnesses in Gaza from October 2023 onwards. I have previously heard someone on the radio tell us we mustn’t use the term ‘genocide’ because the matter is before the International Criminal Court and we might prejudice the outcome! This completely overlooks the point of why there is an anti-genocide movement at all: people want it stopped. They want action.

First, it’s not illegal to talk about genocide in regard to Israel’s onslaught against the people of Gaza. It’s illegal in the UK to cover a situation that is the subject of active proceedings in a British court which is going to be tried by a jury in a way that might prejudice or unduly influence it (e.g. disclose information or claims about a victim or a witness). This is not the case with matters which will be heard by judges only, such as civil cases or appeals, and it is not the case when the matter is not being heard by a British court, jury or no jury. The ICC is an international court, located in the Netherlands, so it is in no sense a British court, and does not use juries. Second, any word for a crime is a legal term, and when a crime is discovered — say, a body is found of someone who was obviously killed by someone else — words like murder are freely used. For example, after the killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in London in 1992, headlines called it murder and one headline read “Boy found clinging to sex murder mum”. After an innocent man was accused of the crime and acquitted after it turned out that a ‘confession’ was made to impress a ‘girlfriend’ who turned out to be an undercover police officer, it was later traced to a serial rapist and double murderer from south-east London, Robert Napper, who pled guilty to manslaughter and was sent to Broadmoor.

Third, and most importantly, the standard of evidence required to act to prevent or stop a crime taking place is much less than what is required to convict someone of a crime and send them to prison or the gallows. You cannot try people for anything without taking such action; you cannot put a concentration camp guard on trial for torture, murder, genocide or whatever while he is still in post. This applies to ordinary people as well as to the state. When the police are made aware of a household or institution in which children are being abused, they raid the house to rescue the children. They do not wait until an individual is proven guilty. If two strong men are walking together and discover a man raping a woman, they disturb the man and if he does not run away, they pull him off. They do not have a debate about it or go and try to convince a panel of experts that what they were seeing really was rape; by that time, the woman might be dead. When atrocities were being clearly reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, military action was demanded and (albeit three years late) delivered; we did not wait for anyone to be convicted or for a court to rule on what legal terms applied. It took many more years for that to happen.

History shows that genocides only stop when they are stopped. The Holocaust stopped when Nazi Germany was occupied by the victorious allied powers and the concentration camps liberated; the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda stopped when the Rwandan Patriotic Front occupied the country and forced the Interahamwe out. When the genocidal campaign of the Bosnian Serbs (the Chetniks) was raging in the early 1990s, western radio talk shows and newspaper letters pages were full of calls for military action — the deployment of troops and use of bombs — to stop it; today, the campaign has for much of the last two years been too timid, too afraid of being arrested for “supporting terrorism” or accusations of antisemitism (and also, after the wars of 20 years ago, distrustful of western military intervention) to demand anything more than a ceasefire, or at most the cessation of arms supply and for their governments to take a “tough stance” on Israel. 

But it’s soul-destroying to regularly see footage of atrocities on social media and then hear both radio presenters and politicians falling over themselves not to offend the perpetrators or their supporters by calling this what it is, to insist that Israel, a reprobate state with a human rights record far worse than many third-world dictatorships, “has a right to defend itself” from an internal rebellion from natives it has incarcerated and oppressed in numerous ways for the past half century. Last month when our politicians started to concede that our government’s close relationship with Israel might be too much of an embarrassment to continue with, David Lammy’s speech did not mention the words crime, atrocity or genocide once and was laden with appeals to his own support for Israel, his condemnation of Hamas, his desire for “a strong friendship with you based on shared values, with flourishing ties between our people and societies”, Britain’s bilateral relationship with Israel and a whole lot of other cant aimed at Israel’s “better nature” and its presumed concern for “the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”. (Let’s not forget, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Labour party in the 2019 election, when a senior female Labour politician was asked if she considered it antisemitic to even talk of Israeli atrocities, she hurriedly agreed that it was.)

Yet, the censorship continues in the mainstream media; we continue to watch our friends and their children being murdered in plain view while the media debate whether crimes are even taking place (and cutting off people who say they are) and politicians continue to placate both Israel and its apologists in London and New York. Enough. It is absurd to talk of waiting for the ICC to rule before we can call it genocide. It is like waiting for the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials before Auschwitz has even been liberated, and those who silence and censor talk of genocide are collaborators, and we must entertain the possibility that they are willing collaborators.

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Timothy Evans (John Hurt) is led to the gallows in 1971 film 10 Rillington Place. He was later proven to be innocent.

Peter Hitchens, writing for UnHerd this week (and in a videoed discussion with its editor-in-chief, Freddie Sayers), makes a case for bringing back the death penalty, abolished for murder in the UK in 1965. He opines that capital punishment, when “properly conducted”, “makes a country less vengeful and more gentle” and that the alternative of long imprisonment is damnable on the grounds of its cruelty to the convict, a point made by the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1868. He would require a number of reforms to the judicial system before supporting reinstating the death penalty, among them abolishing majority verdicts, imposing stricter controls on juror selection such as a higher minimum age and requirements of life experience and education and allowing judges to “halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence”. He also alleges that the abolition of the death penalty weakened the British tradition of the unarmed police, leading to the arming of the police by the “back door” with the use of Tasers and “a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt”. It also correlates with a vast increase in incidents of both homicide and woundings that, but for improvements in modern healthcare, would have meant a massive increase in murders since the death penalty was abolished in 1965.

I take issue with the suggestion that a country with the death penalty is “less vengeful and more gentle”. He asks us to look not at the USA but at Britain up until the mid-1950s. Hitchens was born in 1951 and thus his memory of that period will be a little sketchy. The execution of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old with a learning disability whose 16-year-old accomplice had shot a police officer dead during a robbery, took place in 1953; his alleged words, “let him have it”, were assumed to mean ‘shoot’ rather than “hand over the gun” (and both the accused denied these words were said). The Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, cited public opinion among the reasons not to grant clemency to Bentley, in particular because the victim was a police officer. He dismisses the example of the US, “an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence”, but in the US, the only other country in the developed world to retain the death penalty, families campaign to have those who killed their loved ones executed even after decades in prison on death row (as in this case in Indiana, a state that never had slavery); in the UK, it is generally accepted that murderers whose crimes are not highly aggravated (e.g. by the victim being a child, or there being multiple victims, or being tortured or raped before their killing) will be released after serving their minimum period of imprisonment, albeit on a monitored life licence. And surely the reason our police continue not to carry firearms, unlike in the US, is that the population mostly does not possess them. American police carry guns, whether they work in a death penalty state or not, and the ready availability of guns is the major reason our murder rates do not approach theirs.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to the death penalty in the sense of believing that we are somehow no better than murderers ourselves if we put a serial killer or war criminal to death. Hitchens, however, characterises this as a position of the radical left (though not the ‘serious’ Left, as “two of the greatest figures of the British Left, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin”, along with many working-class Labour MPs, voted in its favour in 1948), yet I have seen it expressed in recent years by figures very definitely of the Right (e.g. Lawrence Fox), including on UnHerd recently. Although Labour were in power when it was abolished, it has survived three subsequent bouts of Tory government, one of them lasting 18 years. With it having last been used in the early 1960s and abolished for other than treason in 1965, sixty years ago, three whole generations will have never known a world in which it existed. This seems to be the case of members of parliament exercising their judgement rather than sacrificing it to their electors’ opinion. I do believe it should be available to war crimes tribunals, precisely because the risk of misidentification is that much less and also because the gravity of the crimes that much higher: kidnap, torture, rape and murder on a grand scale, on the orders of political and military leaders. A person picked up by police at the roadside and accused of being Ratko Mladić could prove his innocence more easily than a Black man picked up in Mississippi and accused of a murder committed by another Black man in a society where many white people would fail to distinguish one Black person from another and might even say “they all look the same”.

Hitchens notes that the two executions he witnessed in the US were for crimes which were long in the past, and were so disconnected from those crimes as a result that they could not be expected to deter anything. However, that time lag occasionally allows for an innocent person to have their case re-examined; when the UK had the death penalty, it was carried out weeks after the sentence was issued. Timothy Evans, for example, was tried for his wife’s murder on 11th January 1950 and hanged on 9th March the same year. A major witness was John Christie, his ground-floor neighbour, a man with multiple previous convictions for thefts and one for malicious wounding (from having hit a woman on the head with a cricket bat), supposedly a reformed character after serving as a special constable (a volunteer policeman) more recently. Three years later, Christie himself was revealed to be the killer, having been arrested for numerous other murders of women including his wife. His trial began on 22nd June 1953 and he was hanged on 15th July the same year. This is considerably less time than it normally takes for a miscarriage of justice to be acknowledged and redressed; first appeals nearly always fail. The majority of the victims of the 1970s miscarriages of justice, such as Stefan Kiszko and many of the groups convicted wrongly of IRA bombings, would have been executed less than two months after trial. So, we have the choice of a swift execution or a long wait on Death Row in the hope that some mistakes might be corrected.

To be fair, Hitchens says he would not support the return of the death penalty in the present legal climate, without some significant reforms. There is a perception that no amount of judicial safeguards and no evidential threshold will be enough to prevent all miscarriages of justice and one is too many. In the event that a bill is proposed to reintroduced the death penalty, I suspect it will not have such safeguards because it will be in response to an egregious murder and laden with demands to execute more murderers rather than make sure we don’t execute anyone wrongly. He suggests abolishing majority verdicts (i.e. requiring unanimous ones), a measure justified by the need to circumvent “juror nobbling” in trials of professional criminals or gangsters (perhaps unanimity should be required outside of those particular situations). When someone is convicted, the law does not distinguish between a majority verdict and a unanimous one, or a case won on the basis of a welter of scientific and other types of evidence and a case won on the back of a lot of weak circumstantial evidence. People later suspected or proven to be innocent were portrayed and perceived as the most evil and depraved person in the country at the time of their conviction; Hitchens mentions Lucy Letby, but the cases of Sally Clark and Donna Anthony (bereaved mothers accused of murders which did not in fact happen at all), or Gerry Conlon, told by his trial judge that he should have been charged with treason so he could be sentenced to death, then by the appeal judge that it was better that a few innocent people suffer than the whole system be impugned, are just as instructive. In the kinder, gentler world of 1951, all these people would have been hanged in six weeks, rather than the years it took to prove their innocence.

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A little over a week ago, in council elections across the UK and a parliamentary by-election in a historically safe Labour seat, the so-called Reform UK party, whose leader is Nigel Farage who previously ran the Brexit Party and before that was leader of UKIP and is notorious for bringing everything down to immigration, gained control of a number of provincial county and unitary councils which neither that party nor its predecessors have ever done before, as well as gaining the seat of Runcorn and Helsby on the outskirts of Liverpool from Labour, a by-election triggered by the resignation of the old MP who was convicted of assaulting a constituent in the street last October. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, penned a piece for the Times (paywalled, but archived here) which contains a lot of platitudes but very little substance other than a warning not to rip up fiscal rules and a mention of “reforming the out-of-control benefits bill left by the previous government” which started its period in office with an attack on disabled people’s allowances, but a major response has been that Labour should focus more on “stopping the boats” than on anything that might improve anyone’s standard of living, least of all the threat of cuts to disability allowances, something Labour freely condemned when they were in opposition and the Tories were doing it.

One of the loudest Labour MPs favouring an over-emphasis on immigration is Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector who is now MP for Pendle and Clitheroe in Lancashire, one of the counties Reform gained control of (from the Tories) last week. His Twitter feed is full of “culture war” talking points, accusations of Labour being dominated by a “liberal elite” out of touch with Labour’s ‘traditional’ (read white) working-class base. Hinder wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph, a paper heavily associated with the Tory party and probably read by few working-class people, which starts with a claim that “the engines of the liberal establishment are revving up to explain why Reform’s success is not down to the one thing we know it definitely is: immigration”. He makes a brief statement of three examples of his support for what is commonly thought of as Labour policy, but then proclaims that “immigration is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working-class people are generally the losers”. He demands that Labour pursue a “net-zero” migration goal, of one person entering for one leaving.  He has also called for ‘reform’ of our human rights rules on the basis that a number of deportations have been blocked on “right to family life” grounds, as if the HRA did not guarantee rights to British citizens also (for example, the right of disabled people to live in their own homes rather than institutions).

There is a tendency for ‘populist’ right-wing politicians to talk of immigration, and sometimes ‘identify’, as codewords for race. Judging by Hinder’s recent posts, I suspect the same is true of him. When the Telegraph reported that an 18-year-old Muslim council candidate won a seat on Burnley after giving an interview to PoliticsHome in which she advocated separate public spaces for women, such as gyms, because Muslim women were not comfortable sharing spaces with men, he proclaimed: “we have to put our ‘cultural sensitivities’ in the bin and sort this out. Intolerable”. He also retweeted someone who called this “proper sectarian stuff”. Two weeks earlier, when the Supreme Court gave its ruling on the meaning of ‘woman’ in British equality law (i.e. that it excluded trans women), he gave it his enthusiastic support, sharing among other things Blue Labour’s tweet calling it a “common sense and definitive ruling” based on “biological reality”. This ruling was partly about the circumstances in which one sex can be discriminated against, such as in crisis spaces such as women’s shelters and rape counselling centres, as well as more mundane women’s facilities such as toilets and, yes, gyms. But as soon as Muslim women want spaces away from men, this becomes ‘intolerable’.

An important aspect of these results that has been glossed over in the debate over what lesson Labour should learn from them is that the biggest loser in terms of seats was the Tory party who lost 674 council seats in the authorities in which elections were held (which was by no means all of them) compared to Labour’s 187. Reform gained 677 (from nothing), the Lib Dems gained 163 and the Greens 44. Many of the county councils were rural counties whose urban centres have been excised to unitary authorities since the late 1990s: Nottingham, Leicester and Derby are all unitary, and aren’t governed by the new Reform (or Reform coalition) county councils. The Lib Dems also gained control of three councils: Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire (the last from the Tories, the other two from hung councils), while both Labour and the Tories gained no councils between them. The dissatisfaction with Labour is clear, but what also appears to be happening is that the former Tory vote is moving to Reform, and that depending on the performance of Reform councillors around the country, Labour at the next election may not have the advantage of a divided Right anymore. It has been reported that many candidates stood for Reform not expecting, or even wanting, to win and have no idea how they will juggle their council commitments with work. How this situation will be resolved remains to be seen, but it could result in some quicker than expected council by-elections.

But as for why Labour lost so badly in places they should have won, just a year into a Labour government, perhaps immigration played a part but there is no denying that people are angry at Labour continuing Tory policies of targeting the welfare system and those who need the support it provides while spouting rhetoric about “working people”. Imposing means-testing on winter fuel payments is pure political folly, even if a lot of the recipients can afford it, because pensioners are far more likely to vote than younger people, but targeting disabled people who bore the brunt of fifteen years of Tory austerity policies and the demonisation that went with it, behaving as if even more people are getting support to live with disability who “don’t need it” than the Tories claimed, simply betrays everything many of us thought Labour stood for. Labour have touted reforms (read cuts) to PIP (Personal Independence Payment) as a means of getting people back to work; PIP is not an out-of-work payment but rather a way of meeting the cost of being disabled, by paying for things like wheelchairs, vehicles, adapted computers and software and the like. By continually harping on the virtues of work, they ignore the fact that many disabled people could not work reliably because their condition requires medical attention often, because of relapses or crises; it ignores the fact that a lot of workplaces are physically inaccessible to wheelchair users and many employers are unaccommodating, even if the job could be done by a disabled person.

When Kamala Harris lost the US presidential election last year, some of her supporters blamed the loss on ‘woke’ or her perceived closeness to trans rights, despite these issues having been present four years ago when Joe Biden won. All the immigration issues we have now were present less than a year ago when Keir Starmer won a large majority in parliament, and progressive parties won a combined majority of the popular vote. What’s changed is Labour’s stance towards pensioners and the disabled. The people insisting that the turnaround could only be because of immigration are those who already have an anti-immigration bias. Labour have to understand that if they do not serve the needs of the working class, Reform will step in and cater to the prejudices of some of them. They cannot beat Reform at their own game because Reform will always proclaim that it is not enough or find another scapegoat. Labour need to get to work at repairing the damage caused by fifteen years of Tory government, restoring the fabric of society — social care, social housing, youth clubs, libraries, schools — rather than boasting that they will make people’s lives harder, not easier. They have a substantial majority in parliament and four more years to make a positive change. If they spend their time making it a meaner place with more clampdowns on disability benefits and work visas, they will produce the conditions for Reform to sweep to power in 2029.

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A major driver training organisation in the UK, which is part of a major driver recruitment agency, today claimed that the UK’s haulage industry risks falling into the same crisis of recruitment seen during the height of the pandemic five years ago unless it “tackles a looming retirement crisis”, with 55% of today’s professional drivers aged between 50 and 65 and little interest in the occupation from school leavers. John Keelan-Edwards of Driver Hire Training mentioned the lack of overseas drivers that we ‘enjoyed’ during the post-2004 years and also the lack of diversity in the profession. He suggested temporary sign-on bonuses but said that the biggest necessity was persuading school leavers of “the fulfilling and varied careers they could have” as lorry drivers. There is no mention, at least in this little article, of the reason why people do not want to be truck drivers anymore, and are leaving the industry, which is the poor treatment and facilities we are expected to tolerate. Tomasz Orsyński wrote an article in July 2021 detailing twenty reasons for the shortage, which includes some of the points I make here, and nothing has changed.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, I was doing mostly “class 1”, or articulated/semi truck work. This was for a mixture of mostly air and palletised freight companies and the Royal Mail. In 2021 I let my air freight clearance lapse, because I did not want to work for any of the operators around Heathrow anymore. The work was tedious, often involving sitting for hours at the cargo sheds around the airport. Facilities were extremely poor: the ‘Horseshoe’ had one toilet facility for all the male drivers consisting of one urinal, one actual toilet and two sinks. At bonded warehouses (which store air freight which has already been security cleared), the law states that a visiting driver has a right to use a toilet and should be escorted if need be, but they would sometimes refuse if it wasn’t convenient for them (at one point I was told to defecate in a bush if I was desperate). One of said companies (a subcontractor to several major airlines) sent me on a trip to Manchester, and staff at their depots kept me waiting for hours at more than one of the ports of call resulting in my exceeding my 15-hour working day on two occasions, and then refused to pay me for the full day as it would make the violation too obvious. (They told me I should have rung them at one of the places concerned; they should have known I was doing the Manchester run, and got the freight out quickly as it was time critical.)

I did three or four separate stints at the Royal Mail between 2017 and 2023 (I had previously worked for them at Vauxhall, since demolished to make way for the new American embassy and luxury developments at Nine Elms) but that was driving small trucks on local routes, not big trucks on ‘trunk’ routes). On the first of these I got a lecture from the transport manager at Woking for stopping mid-journey to use a toilet, having found the toilets at their Coventry depot inadequate (meaning: few in number, dirty, smelly and crowded). My most recent encounter with them ended after an encounter with a rude “health and safety” jobsworth at their new national hub outside Daventry, who barked at me to put my yellow jacket on when walking ten paces from the door of the building to the door of my truck cab in broad daylight on a 30ºC (or more) summer day. I then had to explain myself to another jobsworth at the local depot in Greenford, west London, and that ended with him telling me not to come in for any more shifts. This local depot had an infestation of rats, one of which I saw in the room where the staff vending machines and water fountain were located; I was informed that said rats had been disturbed by the nearby works on the new high-speed railway. Royal Mail insists on long-sleeved jackets, unlike almost any other logistics company (a lot of construction companies insist on high-visibility trousers as well); these are tolerable at night and in colder weather, but being made of woven plastic are extremely uncomfortable when it is hot, something the organisation has not taken into account at all. The same Daventry depot, despite being newly built, had several toilets out of commission that day (it has fewer toilets than the old National Distribution Centre round the corner), but had time to employ a lackey to drive around in a big car looking for petty “health and safety” breaches to nag people about.

In my experience, the bigger the company, the longer the list of rules and the worse environment it will be to work at. The biggest offenders are the international logistics companies with three letters for names. In the month or so after leaving Royal Mail in 2023, I had a two-week stint at a printworks in west London, which was not perfect by any means (moving pallets stacked high with heavy printed material is hard work) and the cab stank of the previous driver’s food, with crisp dust you could taste in the air (another common problem), but I mostly delivered to and from small printing companies and was required to wear a yellow jacket only once, on the last delivery to a depot of one of those three-letter companies. The jackets have their place, but have spread far beyond that; they are seen (or posed) as an essential guarantee of safety, when in reality they seem to be a substitute for common sense. As truck drivers, we deal with hazards all the time, and most of them are not clad in fluorescent jackets. The way to avoid accidents is for the driver to look where he or she is going and for others not to do stupid things like walk in front of a moving vehicle or behind it when reversing.

As Tomasz Orsyński put it, drivers are treated like thieves; I would say the rules at many sites presume we are thieves, idiots or both. He mentions the practice of expecting drivers to hand in their keys and sit in a waiting room, or even a cage, while being loaded or unloaded; this is often in addition to the truck being physically immobilised to stop it being driven off the bay. When a vehicle is being “live loaded”, i.e. loaded through the back while the trailer is connected to a tractor unit, or it is a single truck, one of these measures is perfectly sensible, but immobilising the truck makes all the others unnecessary. Some depots do not allow the driver to disconnect the truck so as to remain in the vehicle, and others demand we hand over the keys and wait in their waiting room (with no guarantee of how long) even when the truck is not coupled. It appears that somewhere along the line, a group of managers has sat in a room and brainstormed everything that could go wrong, or has ever been known to, and everything they could do to prevent them, then done all of them when only one or two would be sufficient. The measures are imposed from the top down, not in consultation with drivers who typically are not unionised at all. The result is that drivers are told: these are the customers and what the customer wants, the customer gets, and if you don’t like it, tough.

So, you can go round schools telling the kids that truck driving is some sort of enjoyable, varied career where they can get to see the country and meet people, but the truth is that large parts of it have been taken over by a few small companies where the senior management are remote from the workforce; they are impersonal and have a long list of demeaning, often pointless rules. The family firms where the boss started out as a driver in his dad’s firm are mostly long gone. There will be a lot of waiting around, a lot of repetition and a lot of physical work and facilities will be poor. A lot of schoolchildren will be used to that, of course, but might have been looking forward to being treated like an adult, something that is getting rarer and rarer in this industry. If they want to recruit or retain drivers, they will need to look at how they treat the ones they have, because people will not tolerate being treated like dirt indefinitely.

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Inshah Malik, blinded at age 14 by a pellet gun fired by an Indian soldier at a Kashmiri freedom demonstration in Srinagar

Since the terrorist attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir this week, in which two of the attackers were reported to be Pakistanis (which according to the Hindu nationalist/fascist government in India implicates the whole state of Pakistan), Zionists — Jewish and not, and in this case not — have sought to draw connections between India and Israel and Pakistan and the Palestinians, on count of both of the latter being Muslim (mostly in the case of Pakistan, more than half in the case of the Palestinians). I came across this profoundly ignorant tweet the other day, by someone who has spent the time since October 2023 gleefully repeating every bit of pro-Israel propaganda she can get her hands on while also cheering on Donald Trump’s repressions against anti-genocide protesters in the US:

India was formed in 1947, with Muslims going to Pakistan. They’ve been dealing with terrorism ever since. 

Israel was formed in 1948, with Muslims going to Palestine. They’ve been dealing with terrorism ever since.  

It’s so interesting to me that I’ve never heard anyone ask if India has a right to exist.

On this evidence, Brianna Wu seems to know nothing about the history of India and Pakistan, why Pakistan was formed and why there has been conflict between the two states intermittently since they were formed (as part of Britain’s withdrawal from its empire) which has ramped up in the past ten years or so. The conflict originated because the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir sided with India while its majority Muslim population sought to join Pakistan. Pakistan ended up with what are known as the “northern areas” as well as a small part of the Kashmir valley known as Azad (Free) Kashmir; India ended up with most of the valley, the majority Hindu Jammu area (the province is called Jammu and Kashmir) and Ladakh which is majority Tibetan Buddhist. However, this left a large population of Muslim Kashmiris marooned in India under an often oppressive occupation.

India has not “had to deal with terrorism ever since”. It does not have to maintain control over Kashmir; that is their choice. Whatever terrorism has taken place is not aimed at Indian Hindus for just being Indians or Hindus but at ending India’s occupation of Kashmir. It is also dwarfed by India’s violence against ordinary Kashmiris as well as that of the fascistic movement which rules a number of states in India and from which the prime minister, Narendra Modi, comes. To give a recent example from Kashmir itself, Indian troops have fired pellet guns at not only peaceful demonstrators but also ordinary people going about their business and even at people just looking out of their home windows, resulting in people losing their sight including some children. Over the years, Muslims in much of India, the north-west in particular but intermittently in other states (e.g. Karnataka in the south-west), have been subjected to a reign of terror which has included orchestrated pogroms with state collusion, lynchings of innocent Muslims (often on the pretext that they were in possession of beef), rapes, destruction of homes, mosques and businesses either by mob burnings or by legal and bureaucratic means, and deprivation of citizenship for Muslims living in border areas. This has all been amply reported in the international media over many years; the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 by an organised Hindu mob made front-page news here in the UK. Ten years later came the Gujarat pogrom, in which there is clear evidence of state collusion.

There is another crucial difference between India and Israel, which is that the supremacist movement that dominates India is not based on a recent history of oppression or trauma. There is no Hindu equivalent of the Holocaust (not that the Palestinians are to blame for that; the country principally responsible is now on Israel’s side). Much like the Serbian nationalists in Europe, it exploits grievances from centuries and dynasties long past to foment hostility to their peaceful neighbours to further their eventual aim of a ‘pure’ Hindu nation. In more recent history, Hindus and Muslims (and Indians of other religions, such as Christians and Buddhists) were oppressed together by the British colonials: the exploitation of India’s resources to fuel the British industrial revolution (at the expense of India’s own industries), the punitive taxation, the regular famines (such as the one in eastern India in the 1940s which killed between 800,000 and 3.8 million) which have not reoccurred since independence. Muslims have in nothing like living memory oppressed Hindus in India, yet Hindu chauvinists find ways to whip up their flock to hate their Muslim neighbours.

Wu’s tweet also utterly overlooks the complexities of Partition. Muslims did not all just go to Pakistan; there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. The majority of those who relocated were in the Hindi-speaking north of the country, and in Punjab and Bengal (the majority of Muslims here relocated to what is now Bangladesh, as did a large body of Muslims from Bihar, to the west of Bengal). Until the rise of the BJP and the associated fascist movement, many Indian Muslims considered their position to be superior to that of Pakistanis as India had remained a democracy, Muslim sensitivities were respected in law and customs that were different from those of Hindus remained legal, and the country was in some ways more prosperous than Pakistan (although there are more extremes of wealth and poverty than in Pakistan). Outside of Kashmir, there was no reason for there to be any terrorist campaign. It was Hindu fanatics who started one.

Brianna Wu is the same age as I am; she is old enough to have read of some of the major developments in the world’s biggest democracy in mainstream newspapers, radio and TV channels. She is choosing to gloss over the closest thing nowadays to a KKK-style regime of terror against a minority community, one that employs lynchings and mob violence on a regular basis while the authorities sit and watch, by portraying the victims as the terrorists. This is, of course, the history of her party, the US Democratic Party which ruled much of the United States (including her home state of Mississippi) on a similar basis, with African Americans disenfranchised and subject to mob violence, legally mandated segregation and public lynchings for several decades from the 1890s to the 1950s. (Wu is white; her husband is of Chinese background.) She has stated recently (after previously denying it) that she is considering another run for office, having been defeated in a primary in Massachusetts in 2018. If this is the future of American liberalism, a wilfully ignorant bigot who cheers on a criminal administration as they round up legal immigrants for lawful protest, denies an obvious genocide and pretends not to notice the state terror that threatens to lead to it in another country, one with a billion population where a ‘small’, less sophisticated genocide could claim more lives than the Holocaust, there really is no hope for her already benighted country.

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Gravestones at the Srebrenica genocide memorial

The other day I saw a Twitter post about the ongoing genocide in Gaza by a local doctor who was asking where all the human rights advocates were, the “moral architects” who “wept in Bosnia [and] marched in Darfur”. It made me write a short thread about the differences and similarities between the two situations. I was a teenager while the war in Bosnia was going on in the early 1990s, and I was not Muslim then (I converted in 1998). There is also a legal effort going on in the UK to revoke the proscription of Hamas, which makes it an offence not only to raise funds for them or for the organisation itself to operate here, but also to use words indicating support for them and such things as wearing their emblems. This has led to an outpouring of contempt from the Tories and the right-wing commercial media, with one of the lawyers asked how he slept at night on GB News over the weekend. There is no chance of the appeal succeeding, but it has at least opened up debate.

The atrocities in Bosnia were regularly reported in the press and on TV. There was no Internet to speak of in the early 1990s (it was only opened to public access in 1991; most people did not even have dial-up Internet, blogs were ten years away and social media fifteen), so the “mainstream media” as we now call it was the media. We saw footage of emaciated men behind barbed wire, we heard stories of camps where women were held and raped by Serb militiamen, some of whom had recently been their neighbours. The siege of Sarajevo, and later of Srebrenica, Žepa and Goražde, were in the news regularly, along with atrocities such as the Sarajevo bread queue massacre and the snipers who picked off civilians in the street from positions in the mountains. Later, the outright genocide at Srebrenica, a designated “safe area” (the UN had pointedly refused to call it a safe haven) in which men and boys from the captured town were taken away, under the noses of Dutch UN peacekeepers for “war crimes screening” and then massacred; this was the incident which finally prompted western military action agains the Serbs which allowed the Bosnian army to make advances and free long-besieged enclaves such as Bihać in the north-west of the country. Throughout the war, there was public support for military action to stop the atrocities, expressed in demonstrations, letters, opinion columns and calls to radio shows; the government was resolutely opposed, refusing to even allow Bosnian refugees in. Some of the people calling for action were prominent politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. The pressure was contemptuously rebuffed; “everyone knows you don’t interfere in a civil war” was the refrain. An arms embargo was in force, resulting in the Bosnian army being unable to maintain its supplies while the Serbs got theirs from Russia. This was all very well-known.

Back then, the Gulf War was a recent memory and there was still a certain amount of confidence in the power of humanitarian interventions, that a short intervention (that was always the word used, never war or invasion) could check the power of a tyrant (or overthrow him) and stop mass murder. At the time, there were two “no-fly zones” in Iraq where Saddam Hussain’s air force was banned from flying in order to protect the Kurdish and Shi’ite Arab minorities he had been persecuting. That was the Middle East; if we could do that in Iraq, surely stopping a genocide in the mountains of eastern Europe were well within our capabilities. While at university, when I did have Internet access, I recall a posting on a Usenet newsgroup by a woman who said she had received a letter from the government, on House of Commons headed paper, telling her that there would be no intervention on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia as their aim was to secure “Christian Europe”. I did not and still have no way of verifying the posting’s claims, but more recently, we have heard from American politicians such as Bill Clinton who said that European leaders expressed exactly this sentiment: that a Muslim state just didn’t belong in Europe and they had no intention of intervening to bring one about. However, British troops did serve (if ineffectively for most of the war) as UN peacekeepers and were not tarnished by the failure to protect civilians at Srebrenica; some individuals went to fight for the Muslims, not all of whom were Muslims themselves. We were free to speak about the situation and no side was off limits as a result of being classified as terrorists.

There have, of course, been protests against the genocide in Gaza. Politicians have gradually moved from blunt refusals to acknowledge that Israel is doing anything but defending itself to half-hearted demands that they obey international and humanitarian law, knowing full well that they have no intention of doing so. The mainstream media’s spectrum of opinion runs from open support, with flat denial that it is genocide, to a fearful omertà, every mention of genocide being met with a mandatory statement about Israel’s right to self-defence (eighteen months into an onslaught against civilians) and the matter of genocide being under consideration by the International Criminal Court, as if the matter was going to be decided by a jury rather than a panel of expert judges. There has been the same policing of ‘antisemitism’ as dictated by the same Zionist ‘mainstream’ Jewish organisations and the same newspaper columnists that led the campaign to destroy the Labour party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership; there have been numerous incidents of people being told not to display ‘antisemitic’ posters, such as those comparing Israelis to Nazis, or arrested for calling Asian politicians coconuts, and one march on a Saturday was banned because a synagogue was nearby, while the protesters bend over backwards to avoid blaming the Jewish community.

However, the protests have been timid in terms of their demands. There is no call for military action, despite this being the only way to arrest a genocide. The Holocaust was ended when the allied armies captured the concentration camps; the Rwanda genocide ended when the Rwanda Patriotic Front routed the Hutu Interahamwe; the genocide in Bosnia ended when the international community finally stepped up after Srebrenica. Perhaps the reason is partly that the anti-genocide protests are partly led by the same anti-war forces as the 2003 anti-war protests who have an instinctive distrust of western military intervention, but without other Arab countries lifting a finger (Egypt, most obviously), I fail to see any other avenue. Yes, there were abuses by American forces especially during the recent wars, but they did not approach the viciousness or the death toll of Israel’s in 18 months. The only forces resisting Israel’s genocide are Hamas and the three other small armed factions in Gaza itself. An aspect of the history of genocide that isn’t often acknowledged is that a genocide can be arrested, or at least resisted, by forces whose other behaviour is unsavoury; the Red Army, in between raping their way across eastern Europe, liberated a number of the Nazi death camps while even the collaborationist fascist regimes either refused to submit Jews to Hitler’s ‘resettlement’ plans (as with Franco), or stopped once they learned that ‘resettlement’ meant murder. Rwanda’s forces under Paul Kagame have committed atrocities during their involvement with the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Winston Churchill was known for breaking strikes in the UK and for colonial policies that caused famines in India. The list goes on.

We don’t have to support Hamas as such, or excuse their past behaviour (not only the suicide bomb tactic; they have long served the interests of the Israeli hard right, and both sides oppose any meaningful peace process) to acknowledge that they are currently the only people offering the slightest protection to Palestinians in Gaza from Israel’s murderous intentions. It shouldn’t have been left to them, or indeed to any local faction, to save mostly innocent people from a nation that cares nothing for human rights, as seen in the West Bank before and during the Gaza genocide, and thinks nothing of bombing hospitals, ambulances and tents and sniping children in the head. That is on the international community and the rulers of the Arab world. But the appeal to de-proscribe Hamas in the UK should succeed, because they are doing now is not terrorism; it is the defence of their people, and people should be free to say so, as they did the last time a genocide was being broadcast into our homes daily.

Finally, among the repeated reminders of past Jewish victimhood the state and corporate media has been drip-feeding us recently, there was a play on Radio 4 the other night called The Film, about the move to film the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps in 1945 (the lead characters are the director Alfred Hitchcock and future Granada TV founder Sidney Bernstein). I listened to it as long as I could tolerate, but there was a section where one of the two held the whole German nation culpable for the camps that were all over the place and which they said everyone knew about. If a nation is culpable by just doing nothing, living in a police state, what can we say about a community not dragooned by a police state that actively cheers a genocide on? A community whose schools inculcate children to support Israel regardless of a worsening human rights record or outright genocide, a media that issues propaganda for Israel, sowing false doubts and blaming victims of atrocities, the student groups that do the same, the mass letter-writing campaigns to silence criticism of Israel, the smear campaigns against any Muslims who achieve positions of influence (e.g. Shaima Dallali), the demands that they not be reminded of Palestinian existence (such as by children’s artwork), and most recently the doxing of anti-genocide protesters who are legal immigrants to the US immigration police. Of course, not every individual Jew is responsible for the crimes of the state of Israel and some actively oppose them but there are whole sections of it, major community organisations and mainstream community leaders, who fully support Israel’s genocide. If you are helping Israel’s settlers, snipers and other thugs and mass killers with propaganda and intimidation, you are no better than they are and it’s time you were treated as such.

Image source: Michael Büker, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.

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A small demo against the Gaza genocide outside the closed Allders department store

Anyone remember the “Chav craze” of the early to mid 2000s? Early on in this blog’s history I wrote a piece called “Cursing the Darkness” which looked at websites dedicated to slagging off the poorly dressed kids who hung around some town centres; a site called ChavTowns allowed people to describe the ‘chavs’ in their town, or any town they liked (that site, and its parent site ChavScum, have long since disappeared). Croydon, the town in south London where I grew up, had an entry which described its main shopping centre as a “pikey temple” (using a racial slur for travelling people and lumping the two different types of people together), full of McDonalds and Burger Kings (which was inaccurate although there is a McDonalds, as there is in most town centres). All the websites which sprung up at that time, with names like Glasgow Survival, Sheppey Scum and Chatham Girls, are now defunct but the craze nowadays is YouTube videos focussed on everything that’s wrong with a place now compared to its golden age 40 or 50 years ago. 50 years ago, Croydon was a thriving retail centre which had a fairly new shopping centre which was busy on a Saturday and had few or no empty units. Nowadays the mall in question is a sad sight, with dozens of empty units, only a handful of big names still trading there, and whole sections cordoned off because of unsafe structures or leaky roofs. But who do the YouTubers blame? Immigrants, of course.

Croydon has been a diverse place as long as I’ve been alive. It’s South London. Old-timers will insist it’s Surrey, but it’s been part of Greater London since 1965 and was Surrey in name only before then (it was a county borough, i.e. county and district in one as were many big towns and cities). The southern part of the borough were always affluent and white; the north had big Black and Asian communities with the shops and places of worship that go with that. While Croydon’s affluent south was and remains “true blue” Tory, the north is nowadays a safe Labour seat and the central seat is marginal. Sadly, times have not been kind to Croydon, especially central Croydon. The borough put all its eggs in the retail basket, allowing an extra shopping centre to open the other side of the main shopping street from the Whitgift Centre, the bustling mall shown in the 70s footage. As well as Allders, a homegrown department store on six floors which had been around since the 1860s and at one point was Britain’s third-biggest department store behind Harrods and Selfridge’s and was the centrepiece of a nationwide chain, it had a House of Fraser, a Debenhams and an M&S, and was expecting a John Lewis to follow once Westfield opened up one of its shopping centres there. Then online shopping happened, and department stores suffered because although they offered “retail therapy”, people who just wanted to buy stuff found it easier to order it online, where you didn’t have to hunt through concession sections but could simply search for the garment you wanted in the size and colour you wanted. Then the 2010 Tory government happened, stripping local authorities of funds; then Covid happened, which resulted in the hotels some councils had invested in becoming unviable. Westfield and John Lewis never showed up; Allders and Debenhams went out of business or moved online, and Croydon council went bankrupt.

The videos, however, hold up Croydon’s woes as a sign of how Britain has declined, or been taken over by immigrants, or how society has gone to the dogs since some mythical golden age rather than as a result of the decline of the High Street more generally. One video included footage of the Whitgift Centre in the 1970s and pointed out that women in Croydon still wore skirts in the 70s and weren’t feminists. Mostly, however, the focus is on the apparent preponderance of Black and Asian people in Croydon now compared to in the past. Footage of groups of young Black men just hanging around (especially at night), various people (never white) acting ‘crazy’ with the suggestion that they are immigrants, a guy praying in an island in the middle of an empty dead-end road at night. Basically, people minding their own business, but because they’re not white, that’s scary. Then there is footage of areas with a lot of ethnic shops and Black and Asian customers going about their business, and that too is presented as a sign that they’ve “taken over”.

Having grown up in Croydon, I know there’s a lot to like about it. The town centre with its ugly concrete mini-skyscrapers has been widely derided since the 1960s but it is probably one of London’s greenest boroughs, with enormous acreage of public parks, some of it only walking distance from the town centre and most of it within an easy walk from anywhere anyone lives and an easy bike or bus ride for pretty much anyone else. Back in 1999, when I arrived back from spending two months of the summer in Cairo, I came across a letter in the Croydon Advertiser, opining that “the whole rotten apple needs condemning”; I wrote back saying that anyone who thinks Croydon is bad should spend some time there, where it’s hot all year round and it has a fraction of Croydon’s (let alone London’s) park acreage (they printed it). Most of it is every bit as safe as any other town of its size; there is the odd violent incident, but this doesn’t make it an “urban jungle” or “stab city” — the incidents make headlines precisely because they are not common. I once told an American friend that there had been a record number of stabbings in London that year, and the number was a fraction of what happened in her city (and as the average person cannot get hold of a gun, shootings are rare).

As for comparing it to the Bronx, that is also ludicrous because the Bronx is one of New York City’s five boroughs (London has 31) and roughly a sixth of the land area of New York City with a population of nearly 1.5 million (compared to Croydon borough’s population of 385,000), and while it does have a rough reputation, that stems from some of its housing projects in the south while the borough as a whole is very diverse, with richer and poorer neighbourhoods and it includes a zoo and botanical garden (which includes a tract of ancient woodland) and several universities. So if you lumped Croydon in with Sutton, Kingston, Merton and Richmond (where London’s botanical garden is located), it might merit that comparison. To call Croydon “the Cronx” because of a few stabbings and what you consider too many brown faces is an ignorant, racist slur on both places.

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The new moon over Edinburgh, 1st March 2015. (Source: New Crescent Society).

The issue of when to start Ramadan and when to have Eid has been a bone of contention as long as I’ve been Muslim and probably for much longer. I was made aware of it during my first Ramadan, as the group I was staying with fasted what seemed to be an extra day and went from Harlesden to Dalston to offer our Eid prayers in the Suleymaniye mosque instead of our local one. The issue was that some of the local mosques were basing their decision off calendars, while the Turkish-run mosque was waiting for the moon to be sighted before declaring Ramadan over. Over the past few years there has been an uneasy truce; some mosques, including the so-called major mosques, follow the sightings reported from Saudi Arabia while others waited for more reliable sightings, usually a day later, from anywhere east of the UK but usually South Africa (which is slightly more easterly than the UK but a lot further south than east). There is a communal effort, organised through the New Crescent Society, to sight the new moon in the UK and the old perception that the moon could not be reliably sighted in the UK has been overturned and with it the reliance on South African sightings. This year, however, a Deobandi organisation broke with this tradition by announcing the start of Ramadan the same day as the Saudis did, on the basis of a single sighting through binoculars against a welter of negative sightings from around the UK, and the mosques that followed them relayed it to their followers. This was a great surprise to a lot of us: why was Croydon mosque starting their fasting on Saturday, despite so many negative sightings?

Why is there this disunity? The simple answer is that Saudi Arabia persists in announcing the sighting of the moon when it cannot possibly have been sighted, and their sightings are routinely accompanied by negative sightings from the same region and sometimes from Saudi Arabia itself. The pattern seems to be that they announce a sighting on the first day on which a sighting was possible anywhere in the world. On one occasion, scientific data showed that the new moon might be visible, albeit only with a telescope, in one corner of South America and nowhere else, which Muslim observation bore out, but the Saudis still claimed a sighting. Every year, following these announcements, Muslim satellite TV relays it and Muslim social media is full of of Ramadan or Eid greetings, and without bothering to verify the claim, governments across the Arab world and “major mosques” in the diaspora announce that the new moon has been sighted and it’s Ramadan or it’s Eid. There’s a lot of social pressure which seems mean to resist. Ramadan mubarak. Eid mubarak. Until now, there’s been a group of Muslims, and a network of mosques, which insist on waiting for a reliable sighting to declare the new month. Originally they relied on sightings from easterly countries; more recently, they have moved towards sighting it here. Sometimes the two camps start or finish the same day, but usually not. As I recall, the last time this happened was 2007, when Ramadan coincided with September and everyone started and finished the same day. Broken clocks tell the right time twice a day.

This year, however, Wifaq al-Ulama, a Deobandi body, announced that the moon had been sighted last Friday evening, and thus Ramadan began last Saturday. We first learned of this when Croydon mosque in south London announced that Ramadan had begun; it took a couple of hours for the organisations to clarify why. It seems one of their sighting experts had travelled from his home in Bolton near Manchester to Hope Cove in Devon (not Cornwall as they claimed), some 300 miles further south, and there saw it in his binoculars. They posted a video of him standing in front of his binoculars (mounted on a tripod) and exclaiming “W’Allahi I saw it!”. When questioned about why a sighting only available through binoculars was valid all of a sudden, they informed us they had received a “new fatwa” from Darul-Uloom Karachi, which (or an English translation of which) a related group called ICOUK posted on their website. The questions were not included in this posting; when asking a question of a mufti, one is required to state the relevant facts as the answer might be different otherwise, and the facts here include that the UK’s Muslim community is not a purely Hanafi community but a mixed-madhhab community which, apart from those who simply followed the Saudi announcements, had settled on a method of sighting the moon with the naked eye and sharing the sightings. Wifaq al-Ulama and ICOUK now tell us that they aligned with this position previously because of partial reliance on the Moroccan moonsighting establishment which relies on naked-eye sightings in accordance with the Maliki madhhab; they are Hanafis, and their fiqh accepts sightings through optical aids. However, some of the Muslims in the UK, both converts and migrants from Africa and descendants of both, also follow Maliki fiqh. There are also people such as Somalis and some Arabs who are Shafi’i. This is a mixed community and always has been.

A major criticism of those who insist on traditional moon-sighting methods is that we are causing dissension, or fitnah; yet in the past ten years or so, much of the Muslim community had settled on reliable easterly sightings and then more recently on local naked-eye sightings. There really was no fitnah. In any case, the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) said in a hadith narrated by Abdullah bin Umar (radhi Allahu ‘anhu), “Allah will not let my Ummah unite on misguidance”, so a group of Muslims calling for a return to the Sunnah cannot be called fitnah unless they use undue force or disrupt Muslims celebrating Eid or whatever; Allah knows best. Much as it is not a fitnah for people to call for Muslims to revive any other Sunnah as long as we refrain from using derogatory language about people slow to respond, especially when they are not things that are compulsory, or things where there is disagreement on whether they are or not. For example, while encouraging the wearing of niqab, we don’t abuse women who refuse to wear it, or their husbands, as I have seen people do. I have seen a few unacceptable comments under the announcements on Facebook by ICOUK and Wifaq al-Ulama, suggesting they had “gone rogue” or been ‘bought’ by the Saudis, but for the most part those of us advocating sticking to the Sunnah on this matter have shown good manners and patience. But it’s a mystery why reviving this particular Sunnah is so controversial; maybe because it’s not as convenient in modern times as a fixed calendar. But Islam has never used fixed calendars.

Over the years I’ve developed a lot of respect for the Deobandis; they maintain some of the best Islamic teaching institutes in the western world and they have stood firm on the Sunnah over the years, including outward aspects of the Sunnah such as the beard, turban and hijab. Sometimes they are too harsh, with the result that ordinary Muslims think ill of other Muslims who have never heard of their scholars, but nonetheless, as a result of their initiatives we have access to reliable sources of halal meat and there are places in British towns and cities where people are unafraid to dress according to Islam. Still, their action last weekend let the community down; they acted as if they were the community rather than being part of one, and threw a long-standing effort to revive the Sunnah into disarray.

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