I can't actually believe what just happened.

Something truly serendipitous and cool just happened. So there I am, as you do on a Sunday morning, smoking a breakfast cigarette and trying to plan an article about the English Defence League for a new comment website, The Samosa, that's launching at the beginning of next month. I'm conflicted: on the one hand, the League have shown themselves up at numerous recent 'anti-Islamic Extremism' protests as a bunch of shaven-headed brick-throwing Nazi thugs. On the other hand, a look through their forums turns up a surprising lack of frothing racist bile and quite a lot of well-reasoned, accurately-spelled debate on why, although they're sure that most British Muslims are hardworking people who just want to earn a living, they're very uncomfortable with the idea of Sharia Law.

And I don't know quite what to think about this. Because, whilst being more than happy to share this country with other people of immigrant descent, I don't trust religious extremists of any flavour as far as I can throw them*, and right now Britain does have a problem with religious extremists, in the sense that any citizen who believes that killing innocent people is pleasing to god isn't necessarily someone you want on your travel literature.

So there I am, sipping coffee and puzzling over all this, and meanwhile I'm trying to work out if I should go home, given that there's no food at my house, and ignoring the gnawing in my belly. I can't concentrate when I'm hungry, and my thinking gets more simplistic. Trouble is I can't really afford to eat proper lunch every day at the moment. And then the doorbell rang.

So I shambled out in one of my boyfriend's t-shirts with my hair all over the place and opened it, and much to my surprise there was his next door neighbor, wearing a sparkly blue headscarf and looking like the smiling British Asian version of a Disney fairy godmother, with her son, who seemed to be trying to hide inside his football shirt. Between them they were carrying three delicious-smelling dishes of food which they pushed into my hands, apparently entirely unphased by my heathen half-nakedness.

The lovely next-door neighbor introduced herself and explained that they were celebrating a festival called Eid, the end of Ramadan. Being ignorant, I'd heard of this but hadn't realised its significance, and certainly not that it involved giving tasty food to the hungry twenty-somethings next door. She told me that the Biryani would keep for two days and that the yellow rice dish was pudding and I stammered my thanks and she ambled off to the next house.

So I'm sitting here with my face full of the best poppadom I've ever eaten - baked with cumin seeds and some exciting green spice in them, om nom nom - and feeling tremendously, horrifically grateful and touched. I have NEVER been brought things by a neighbor in London, not for Christmas, not for Easter or Rosh Hashana, not in my old place on the night I spent on the doorstep crying and vomiting, locked out with severe food poisoning. In fact, I've never even had a neighbor come to my house at all except to ask us to please turn the noise down. With all the talk of Islamic extremism, it's easy to forget that Islam also involves, yknow, baking, and being seriously kind to complete strangers. I have never, not ever felt more welcome in London than I do this morning. So, that was my quotient of personal prejudice duly challenged for the day. Thanks, neighbor.

*Going by the case of one large blonde girl at an evangelical primary school I attended, who informed everyone that I was an evil witch who was going to hell because I'd said I didn't want to marry Jesus, this is about thirty centimetres followed by running away very fast.

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...

Notice: Sima Valand

My darlings, I'll be away from the net for a few days dealing with a large and pendulous deadline. I apologise in advance for not updating this blog properly. Meanwhile, via TheFWord, please help out if you can to stop Sima Valand being forcibly removed from the UK. This is down to the wire, so please, if you get a minute, call Virgin or to send an email (the form letter is below):

Sima Valand arrived in the UK, from India, legally in 2006 with her husband. During the 15 years of their marriage Sima was subjected to frequent verbal, physical and sexual abuse by her husband. Following their arrival in the UK, the violence escalated. It culminated in a horrific rape in May 2008. The attack was so severe that Sima made the decision to report it to the police.

While her husband was on bail, the threat to Sima was sufficient to force her to move to Nottingham for her safety. She was subjected to frequent death threats from the husband’s family in the UK and in India because she was pursuing the court case. In spite of this, Sima continued with the case and her husband was eventually convicted and given a lengthy prison sentence.

As a result of the persecution, Sima applied for asylum on the grounds that she had a genuine fear of being killed by her husband or his family if she were returned to India. Before she left India, she had been treated as a slave and beaten by her husband’s family. Their treatment of her was so bad that she attempted suicide. The husband’s jail sentence and the fact that she has begun divorce proceedings have only exacerbated their malice towards her. Her in-laws have contacted her on frequent occasions to tell her that they will cut her up and kill her if she returns to India.

India has a deeply entrenched patriarchal system and women are expected to conform to a strict social code. As a result, although it is Sima’s husband who has been responsible for appallingly violent behaviour, it is Sima’s action in reporting that behaviour and giving evidence against him that is considered shameful amongst her family and the community as a whole.

It is extremely common in India that incidents of serious domestic violence against women are not taken seriously. The police and courts are often unwilling to intervene in such matters. Amnesty International have noted that it is very difficult for women to seek justice through the criminal justice system in India and that women victims of crime are at a severe disadvantage. This means that it is highly unlikely that Sima will get the protection that she needs should she be returned.

Sima was born and brought up in Sudan although she is of Indian origin and has an Indian passport. She has few family members in India and following the court case, these ties have deteriorated. The Home Office have argued that Sima could live with her uncle if she is returned to India. However, the details of the rape case have become widely known and he will no longer speak to her.

Sima’s in-laws in India are aware of Sima’s movements and since being detained on Tuesday, Sima has received threatening messages stating that they know she is about to be removed from the UK and that they will track her down.

In addition, Sima has been diagnosed with and was being treated for deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Her treatment for this has been disrupted by being put in detention and putting her on a long-haul flight would be extremely dangerous to her health.

Please, email the model letter available at IndyMedia or, if you have time, your own version of the letter, to:

Please E-mail/fax Indymedia's model letter (or if you have time, your own version of this letter) to:

CEO Steve Ridgeway
Virgin Atlantic Airways
Manor Royal
Crawley
West Sussex
RH10 9NU

Fax: 01293 444124
Email: customer.services@fly.virgin.com

I actually do predict an actual riot!

Right, first off, to persuade you that the content of this post is much better than it actually is, I want you to stop, open a new window, and listen to this song. It's the new single by The Indelicates, 'The Recession Song', feat. Nicky Biscuit and Mickey from Art Brut. I have been stamping around to it all day; it takes a very special song to make my heart hammer like a tiny flywheel, and this is it.

There's trouble in America, trouble you can touch
You can't go to rehab 'cause it costs too much!
No career, no hope, no fun no fashion
Thank fuck for the fucking recession!

Several posts are cooking, delayed in the ether by other journalism, the kind of writing which I enjoy less but which might possibly pay me enough to carry on eating duchy's original prescription medication, smoking finest gold leaf and keeping the boyfriend in gin and ribbons. I have what I believe to be some incredibly subtle and well-reasoned ideas about what the commentary on Ivan Cameron's death says about the nation, but I'm so damn angry about everything else right now that I just don't trust myself to reason well, or to be tactful in any way. So you'll just have to live without my stunnning insights there. The discussions from Monday's post really did get me thinking, though; would anyone be interested in a separate post about the private school system, if I promised to try and keep it mostly free from disgusting middle-class guilt?

Oh, also: if you woke up this morning even vaguely satisfied with the state of the world, check out the Daily Mail Racial Purity Test, published to great acclaim yesterday. I'm actually not actually joking. Sunder Katwala, Chair of the Fabian Society, has a fantastic response over at Liberal Conspiracy. Essentially, guys, it's not enough to have been born here - both of your parents have to have been born here, and all of your grandparents as well, or you simply aren't German British. That counts me out then, as I don't have even one British grandparent. Perhaps I'll write to them and explain that, whilst I am a lefty and a shortarse, it's not my fault, because I'm a filthy furriner and I don't know any better, and anyway Frank Field says that I won't have a detrimental affect on community cohesion because, yknow, I'm white.

Or perhaps they can get to fuck. I'm PROUD of my immigrant heritage. I have the dark eyes and curves of my mother's Maltese family, the pale skin and fine dark hair of my father's Lithuanian roots; I have the work ethic of my immigrant Jewish family and when I get drunk I sing like my Irish cousins. I was born in the heart of London. This city pounds in my blood with its thousands of cultures and races, its colours, its music and its misery. I'm glad that on my daily walk to the tube I can hear Turkish and Polish and Hindi and Swahili being spoken; that on my way home I can stop and buy halva, or sour cabbage soup or a fresh pide for my tea, or best of all, staggering back high and dazed from a night out, I can stop at the corner shop and pick up a stick of rose kulfi, which is the absolutely nicest thing ever and tastes like a rose might taste if it made love to a mini milk lolly in the back of a seedy pink limousine coated in sugar. I'm proud to live in the most racially diverse city in the world - there are not many things that make me proud of my country right now but that's one of them. Living here has made me a wiser, more knowledgeable and more tolerant person, and I believe that one should only be patriotic about the bits of one's country that challenge you to be better than you are.

I had more to say, but the corner shop shuts in ten minutes and I've made myself want kulfi now. Hold that thought.

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!

They have no compunction.

This week, according to the tabloids, there has been an ‘all party call for a cap on migration’. Bollocks there has. In fact, what has happened is that Frank Field and Nicholas Soames -two of the most foul and bigoted MPs ever to lumber through Whitehall -have ganged up to produce a proposal, Balanced Migration, calling for a cap on the numbers of immigrants entering the country. The disingenuous reporting of the proposal has been nothing short of shite.

Firstly, Balanced Migration is emphatically not an ‘all-party call’ for a cap on migration. One bigoted Tory colossus and his favourite Labour defector does not an all-party call make (Field was raised a Tory before jumping ship in the sixties.) There are, in fact, more than two political parties in this country, and one of the alternatives has commanded around 20% of the popular vote at the last two general elections. This is, in fact, a bipartisan proposal, limited in scope and not officially condoned by either represented political party. Good job this is a basic mistake that only the right-wing tabloids are making, then. Oh, wait.

In fact, both of these MPs have faced massive opposition within their own parties, not least on account of what has appeared to many as scantly-concealed racism. Far be it from me to suggest that Nicholas Soames is a racist. But barely a year ago there were calls from within his own party for him to resign after he quoted figures seemingly lifted from a BNP pamphlet as part of an anti-immigration speech to parliament. And far be it from me to suggest that Frank Field is a racist, but not two months ago the BBC had him all but endorsing Enoch Powell, saying in response to the racist rabble-rouser’s predictions that white people are fleeing the country because of the influx of ethnic minorities: ‘There is apprehension and people are leaving if they can – they don’t like what’s happening to this country.’
Now, I happen to have gotten my grubby little paws on a copy of the proposal, and I’ve read it through, after which I found myself chain-smoking and shaking with rage in the back garden. It’s a vile piece of xenophobic drivel. After the first few pages it doesn’t even try to be polite to ethnic minorities, openly lamenting the fact that fewer and fewer economic migrants are coming from ‘the EU and the Old Commonwealth – Australia, Canada’ and more and more coming from ‘Africa, India and ‘other foreign.’’ Pretty soon after this, its unsupported statistics start unashamedly talking about ‘white’ versus ‘black, asian and other non-white’ as opposed to ‘british-born’ versus ‘foreign-born’. Oh, and on about page three the nation ‘Britain’ apparently becomes interchangeable with a place called ‘England’, entirely omitting to mention that we have at least three other countries with their own devolved governments and proud ancient cultures within this nation state. But that doesn’t bother Field and Soames, neither of whom have, it seems, any particular inclination to even think about Glasgow – where, incidentally, the rate of immigrant cultural integration is commendably high.

In the ‘chapters’ (read: ten lines of ranting and a graph) on social cohesion and community integration, the Bradford riots are cited without detailing any causal relationship between immigration and social unrest. We're merely invited to assume that there is one, and that a cap on migration is the best way to deal with it rather than, say, involving young people in community cohesion schemes and encouraging greater social dialogue. We're also invited to assume that the increasing number of schools where English might not be spoken in the homes of the majority of pupils is intrinsically a bad thing. Actually, English was forbidden in some of the first schools ever established in this country, being the language of the servant classes: pupils at Rugby, Westminster and other ancient British establishment sausage factories were ordered to speak Latin or go back to the provinces. And again, 'balanced migration' - rather than extra language lessons for immigrant pupils and their families - is apparently the answer. The proposal is a racist striptease, tearing away veils of decency paragraph by paragraph to reveal the real sickness behind its slippery statistics: Field and Soames simply don't like ethnic minorities, and they don't want any more of them in their country.

As well as these staggering assumptions-by-omission, there are glaring, basic factual errors throughout the document. One of these is its much-touted claim that, by adding 7 million people to the population of the UK by 2030, immigrants would contribute an equivalent of ‘7 cities the size of Birmingham.’ Have Messrs Field and Soames ever, in fact, been to Birmingham? The West Midlands conurbation of Birmingham had a population of 2,284,093 according to the 2001 census, the largest metropolitan area in the EU. This is either some admirable feat of particular Tory perspective or these MPs and their flunkies simply haven’t done the social research which is, ostensibly, the point of the proposal.

All of this makes me spit. I’m proud to be British, and part of the reason I’m proud is that when my grandparents were driven out of Lithuania in the pogroms, they made a long, torturous journey across war-torn Europe to the UK, hoping for sanctuary, hoping for something better, and they found it. A country where they were allowed to work and worship as they pleased, where they established themselves in business and became leaders in their local synagogues, where their race and religion and country of birth didn’t prevent them and their children from becoming British citizens, and bloody useful ones too. I’m proud to be British, because in 1942 my grandmother was awarded the George Cross along with the rest of her nation in order to "bear witness to the heroism and devotion of its people" after the battering Malta took from and on behalf of the British in WW2. The medal is in her drawer, some little semblance of recompense for the years of starvation and nightly bombing offensives. When this government decides to make a similar gesture to the people of Iraq, maybe I’ll reclaim that frisson of wonder I remember from when I was a little girl peering into Nanna’s jewellery box - until then, never.

My family came to England in a time before Field and Powell, in a time when skilled and unskilled workers were welcomed into the country from the commonwealth and elsewhere, and they flourished. Now the second generation is entering its fifties (happy birthday, mum) you wouldn’t know us from Adam. We're Slavic, European, Celtic - in other words, we're more or less white, and according to Soames and Field, we're a part of the problem, but not the real problem. But if we’d arrived today, we’d still be told by crusty racist MPs and little-England bigots that we were a race apart, instead of representing what this nation is about at its best. We’d most likely have spent years struggling for work permits or languishing in detainment centres. We’d be reduced to numbers on a BNP chart, taking jobs away from good, honest, native-born Britons. It makes me fucking sick.

Because, actually, we are all immigrants, even British-born natives who can trace their families back centuries untold. Immigration is what Britain is all about: since records began it’s been the waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Romans, Normans, Spaniards, Celts, Hibernians, Hugenots, German Protestants, Jews, French, Italians, Chinese, South-East Asians, Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Eastern Europeans and Americans that have kept us vibrant, kept us whole and humble and constantly changing as a nation. It's racists and recalcitrants in power who are the real scum muddying up the waters of change and vitality roaring around these islands, keeping the poor poor and the rich ignorant, holding us back. If the Home Office has any sense at all, it'll drop this sickening tract in the shredder.



ETA: I've given the proposal to my nearest degenerate drug-fiends, and it's being roached as we speak.