Michael Gove and the Imperialists

The Tories want our children to be proud of Britain's imperial past. When right-wing colonial historian Niall Ferguson told the Hay Festival last weekend that he would like to revise the school history curriculum to include "the rise of western domination of the world" as the "big story" of the last 500 years, Education Secretary Michael Gove leapt to his feet to praise Ferguson's "exciting" ideas - and offer him the job.

Ferguson is a poster-boy for big stories about big empire, his books and broadcasting weaving Boys' Own-style tales about the British charging into the jungle and jolly well sorting out the natives. The Independent's Johann Hari, in his capacity as young bloodhound of the liberal left, sniffed out Ferguson's suspicious narrative of European cultural supremacy in a series of articles in 2006, calling him "a court historian for the imperial American hard right," as Harvard-based Ferguson believes that the success of the British Empire should be considered a model for US foreign policy.

This is exactly the sort of history that British conservatives think their children should be learning. "I am a great fan of Ferguson, and he is absolutely right," Michael Gove told the Guardian. The new Education Secretary has declared his intention to set out a 'traditionalist' curriculum 'celebrating' Britain's achievements. Andrew Roberts, another historian set to advise on the new curriculum, has dined with South African white supremacists, defended the Amritsar massacre and suggested that the Boers murdered in British concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity. It looks like this 'celebratory' curriculum might turn out to be a bunting-and-bigotry party, heavy on the jelly and propaganda.

What should shock about these appointments is not just the suspect opinions of Roberts and Ferguson, but the fact that the Tories have fundamentally misunderstood the entire purpose of history. History, properly taught, should lead young people to question and challenge their cultural inheritance rather than simply 'celebrating' it. "Studying the empire is important, because it is an international story, but we have to look at it from the perspective of those who were colonised as well as from the British perspective," said historian and political biographer Dr Anthony Seldon, who is also Master of Wellington College. "We live in an interconnected word, and to one has to balance learning about british history with learning about other cultures."

The ways in which schools and governments structure and promote stories about a country's past, the crimes they conceal and the truths they twist, have a lasting effect on young minds. It is not for nothing that the most fearsome dictators of the twentieth century, from Hitler to Chairman Mao, altered their school history curricula as a matter of national urgency. Even now, the school board of the state of Texas is re-writing the history syllabus to sanitise slavery and sideline major figures such as Thomas Jefferson, who called for separation of Church and State. That the Tories, too, wish to return us to a 'traditionalist' model of history teaching should thoroughly disabuse the Left of the notion that the Conservative party has no ideological agenda.[read the rest at New Statesman]

Reproductive freedom and racial paranoia: or, why Melanie McDonagh can fuck right off.

Shock, horror, disaster: the population is exploding! Yes, the recently-over-reported demographic expansion of 1%, incidentally mitigating the encroaching pensions crisis, has kicked off a chain of explosions - explosions of racial paranoia, class hatred and misogyny. The tabloids, broadsheets and a few bewilderingly respected racist lobbying groups have lost no time in hosting a drooling orgy of dated ideology, merely because a significant portion of the babies being born are, apparently, the wrong sort of babies – babies from ethnic minorities, babies with immigrant parents and lone parents, black babies, poor babies. And according to Amanda Platell of the Mail and Melanie McDonagh of The Telegraph, what this means is that middle class, “Anglo-Saxon” women now have a duty to have more babies in their twenties. I have a spare set of sewing scissors around if anyone cares to unpick the various strands of racism, misogyny and class prejudice going on in those assumptions - let’s just say that it’s all intersectionally fucked. This is a feminist blog, however, so we’ll zone in on the feminism.

I'm going to work on the assumption that by "Anglo-Saxon...women", McDonagh is not making a complex statement on the superior genetic heritage of two of the many waves of immigrants to the British Isles in the past few millennia, the Angles and Saxons as opposed to, say, the Jutes or the Romans or the Vikings or the French, and is instead equivocating over her own racism: what she means to say is that 'white women should be having more babies.' And despite my Mediterranean-Slavic heritage, I'm fairly sure I'm one of the nice young lilywhite gels McDonagh wants to see breeding like paranoid supremacist bunnies.

To which my response is: fuck. Right. Off. I’m not going to be told when and how and with whom I may breed, by anyone, thanks. My body is mine: it’s not a tool of your crumbling kyriarchy, it’s not a self-replicating node in your future white race, and it's not a mute block to shore up a class structure contorting in the face of global migration. Fuck off with your misogynist frothings: I’m not anyone’s baby-making machine. I don’t care when I ‘should’ get pregnant. I’ll carry a child when I want, or not at all.

Moreover, the question begs itself: what precisely has been done over the past, hm, twenty-three years of my life to make it easy or attractive for me to have a child now that I’m in my twenties? Has anyone made it easier for me to combine childcare with my career? Is there a decent nursery placement system, a guarantee that I won’t be fired from my job? Can I definitely work flexibly or part-time and still bring in the money I’d need to raise a child in relative comfort? No? Then, as I may have mentioned, you can fuck right off.

The age when women had babies on everyone’s terms but theirs is dying, and when it finally dies myself and many other willing ladies will gladly line up to piss streams of contraceptive-hormone –laced urine on its sorry grave. Yes, I’m sure it was simpler when patriarchal capitalist social engineering could be affected by refusing to acknowledge a few billion women’s personal agency and capacity to say no. I’m sure it’d solve a few problems in the short term if one half of society suddenly went back to being an unpaid sub-class of slave labourers, squeezing out and raising babies of the correct class, creed and colour, all for free, for the good of the fatherland. But it’s not going to happen, and you can either accept that and work with us or you can shut up and quit your whining. Either way, you'll find yourself making space sooner or later in your boardrooms and offices and benches of justice for the children of 'foreign-born' mothers and for those mothers themselves.

The sublime irony of all this is that if women’s concerns had been taken on board back when we first started pressing for reproductive freedom, if we hadn’t had to spend the past decade fighting campaigns to defend the few precious rights we have to control our own lives and bodies, if we had a system to facilitate free, safe, legal abortion as early as possible and as late as necessary, if we had the morning after pill free and on demand and available in our own homes, if we had a decent childcare system and real, comprehensive sex education in schools instead of the piss-poor, prudish information we dribble out to our children,leaving them to get their education from pornography and television, if we had any or all of that then the right wouldn’t be finding themselves blindsided by sudden demographic change. Because what happens when one is miserly about reproductive freedom is that only certain women are able to exercise it, and those women are almost inevitably the richer ones.

It’s a staggering insult that, more than forty years after abortion was legalised and equal pay acts came into force, the commentariat is blaming women for the fact that the lucky ones amongst us are choosing to exercise the privilege of having fewer children, a privilege that should be every woman’s right. It’s insulting to blame women for exercising the limited choices they have rather than accepting the real consequences of keeping those choices limited.

Personally, I’m more than happy for the generation that comes after me to be - gasp! – over a quarter of immigrant heritage. But just for kicks, let’s go with the notion that a ‘middle class baby boom’ is actually something desirable. If this government and the next wants a greater proportion of babies born to middle-class mothers, it can start by making part-time working a real, highly paid option for men and women everywhere. Give everyone, not just parents, the right to request flexible working and home working, and end the throwback 9-to-5 working culture that’s destroying our mental health as a nation, not to mention our childcare arrangements. End discrimination against mothers and potential mothers in the workplace, and make combining motherhood and paid work a viable choice. Introduce comprehensive, compulsory sex education at every level of schooling from year 5 up – and make sure our children know more about sex and contraception than we did before we started having it. And whilst you’re at it, put some money into sorting out the damn education system so that more of the babies born to immigrant and single mothers will have a chance not to fulfil the disgusting sense of class destiny inherent in this week’s right-wing reasoning.

Reproductive freedom isn’t a fad; women are not going to suddenly get bored of pushing for emancipation at home and in the workplace. If the freedoms we have fought for continue to be restricted and distributed unequally, always with the threat of being repealed any minute, then demographic change won’t be the only surprise the socially conservative, racist right finds itself having to come to terms with. Women’s bodies can no longer be manipulated in the cause of elitist social engineering, especially not the bodies of middle-class women, who enjoy more comprehensive reproductive freedom than their less wealthy sisters. Rather than attempting to pressure and cajole middle-class women into reproducing, the right would do better to encourage education, childcare and reproductive emancipation across the board– not to prevent working-class, immigrant babies being born, but because education and reproductive freedom are every woman’s right, whatever her income, background or country of origin.

Britain's Got Fascists: for the Huffington Post

I know that a) this is a cheat post and b)I'm supposed to be on holiday, not working my tiny butt off trying to get articles down for big online magazines, but here it is: on differences in attitudes to migration in London and New York, for the Huffington Post.

Any contributions to the debate, here or at the HuffPo, would be greatly appreciated. If I get lots of comments they might let me write for them again...

Damn lies and statistics

Today I discovered that I am a migrant! Who knew?

Did North London secede overnight whilst I wasn't watching? (Again?) No, but since all the new jobs in Britain have gone to migrants since 2001, I must logically be one - three times over, in fact. Alan Green, Field and Soames' 'Balanced Migration' campaign is scantily concealed racism doing a desperate recession striptease to garner the 'send em home' vote with little regard for minor fripperies such as actual facts. As anyone giving the plans a cursory glance can tell. However, the distortion of its already distorted statistics by the right-wing press takes the cake.

The logical step at this point, being a patriotic soul, would be to follow general advice and 'go back where I came from'. Perhaps Ms Neeson and Mr Desmond, the Daily Star proprietors, could even pay for me? Islington is only ten minutes away on the bus, and I could visit a selection of its many fine coffee-houses with change for a tenner.

Are you a migrant, too? Take the frothing racist lies test to find out!

ETA: Because I didn't make it clear enough, this is a variant on a meme started by jacinthsong and theoxfordgirl over at livejournal. Meme, not original post. Propagate, spread, disseminate, internet children!