Political Correctness Gone MAAAADDDD!!

..on Ash Sarkar and the Crime and Policing Bill

I've been in an anti-raids WhatsApp group since 2022. Somebody tweeted the link and I added myself. It's an emergency network that alerts to locations where people are being surveilled by live facial recognition or immigration raids.

When you consider that police facial recognition technology can’t tell Black people apart and can be used for racial profiling, an alert system seems necessary.

Nowadays you don't see links like that floating around. Everyone's too afraid.

It's a wholly altruistic underground resistance network (that has no doubt been infiltrated by the police in some way by now) and it can sometimes be very useful.

For example, one alert that caught my attention and that I forwarded on to my bestie Nate, and my ex sent us to Peckham where there was a standoff between police, residents and people in solidarity attempting with our presence to stop someone being dragged off to an immigration detention centre.

After an hour or two of us standing around in solidarity the police left. Without their victim.

Youth worker, Benny Hunter wrote about it for Open Democracy How our community in Peckham fought the Hostile Environment – and won

Since then the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Public Order Bill have become law. I've written about all of them and went onto BBC World service to talk about the former.

Three days ago Labour's Crime and Policing Bill went to parliament. Every government has a landmark piece of crime legislation when in parliament. Margaret Thatcher had one, as did Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Our last few Tory prime ministers had a few, sponsored by the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice as mentioned above.

The three bills in the last parliamentary session were heavily criticised. Expect the same for the Crime and Policing bill because if it becomes law, we’ll all be fucked.

It’s another nail in the coffin for civil liberties in the UK after the draconian measures that were made law by the Public Order Act.

Anybody who cares about civil liberties, their neighbours and community should be concerned.

Labour's authoritarian measures include Police being able to search properties without warrant, banning face coverings at protests, no £200 threshold of prosecution for shoplifting.

The bill also contains new “Respect Orders”, which are reminiscent of the Anti-social Behaviour Orders introduced by the last Labour government before it was abolished in 2014.

I wrote about Respect Orders last year when the Labour Party's manifesto was published.

‘Tough new Respect Orders'. So is the penalty a curfew? Tagging? Or is there a custodial sentence for getting one? What does it actually mean, because I'm imagining the 'unintended' consequences, which they will apologise for in 20 years.’

The bill will also introduce polygraph tests for some offenders. I know this will be controversial as they have been designated for sex offenders.

That area of the Criminal Justice System is always emotive, but I don't think anybody should be subject to polygraphs (which are wholly unreliable,) whether they are sex offenders or not. For one, can you imagine the conditions they are administered in?

I explained my thoughts at length about violent and sexual offenders and sentencing in an interview last year. It's a difficult subject and liable for misinterpretation. So you should listen to it!

It probably won't win me any fans, but I don't care and have never sought fame anyway. In brief I say that longer and longer sentences DO NOT help bring rapists and abusers to justice.

The only people who should be in prison are violent people who present a clear and present danger.

Previously violent people are a risk, but risk decreases as they get older/wiser. It's a more nuanced argument so you'll have to listen to the whole thing. The interviewer presents an emotive hypothetical about Jimmy Saville's co-abusers ... and I reply with what I believe prison is for, which is not retribution.

Sentences are significantly longer than they were 25 years ago for the same crimes. It's one of the reasons Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood instituted an early release scheme last September.

The law and order types who love to opine about the good old days should be happy that with a 40% release date, prisoners will still have served what they did if convicted 25 years ago.

The punitive ratchet of sentencing is responsible for the overcrowding prison crisis, alongside joint enterprise sentences. Scotland, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe. You only have to read The facts behind the prison overcrowding crisis to see where we went wrong.

The Crime and Policing bill will help none of this of course.

Police being given access to people's homes without warrants is madness when you consider the rationale behind it, is that the police have been useless in tackling mobile phone thefts.

They are being rewarded for their own failures. And imagine how it can be used against activists who are already targeted with the face mask ban, the entirety of the Public Order Act and potential phone surveilance.

So all of that sounds pressing and important right?

Yet, what passes for left wing media and commentary spent the week hand wringing about salad spinners and Sam Fender.

The reason for the former is because Ash Sarkar has written a book called ‘Minority Rule’, published yesterday.

Don't ask me to read it. I haven't read some of the books my friends have written. I certainly wont be buying or reading hers considering the manner she has gone about promoting it.

If you and your colleagues continually bang on that you want the ‘best for the left' but then go on the UK's biggest neo-liberal platform, already hostile to left wing politics and socialism to slander them, what is your goal?

Getting famous and selling books to the detriment of everyone else is not ‘best for the left’.

While she has seemingly ameliorated her tone in the last couple of days as she continues her book tour, the damage is done.

As a friend on twitter said, “That News Agents interview especially rubbed me the wrong way. It feels like she was on there to seek approval and essentially say that POC were hysterical without spelling it out explicitly.”

I agree. Whatever she was doing it looks at once like she is blaming black people for the left’s ills and then using her identity and our ancestors as her shield. Why else invoke the Black Panthers and Combahee Collective whilst attempting to say that everyone is overly concerned about white supremacy.

However in one thing she is right. Middle-class white leftists (which I include Ash Sarkar by virtue of her position at Novara Media) do not have an idea of what is actually important to the rest of us.

“The most irritating thing about a lot of this boring anti-idpol, anti-woke stuff is how it has to rely on a kind of identity politics, the construction of the aggrieved "white" working class. That's not class politics. Its identity politics disguised as class politics.

The irony. i.e "As a black person i experience x, you don't know what it feels like to experience y because of privilege" is the same logic as, "as a white person growing up poor, you don't get why idpol is y, because you are the real privileged one (PMC)." How can you people not see this?

- Muhammed Elnaiem

Nonetheless my public ire at her brand of marketing was exacerbated by how Novara Media, where she is an editor, barely acknowledged the Nationality and Borders Bill 3 years ago. I saw then and still see now, the Nationality and Borders Act as an existential threat.

I've been proved right as I explained in my article for The New European last week. The uncomfortable truth about race and Englishness. At he time the bill was making its way through parliament, Novara despite my entreaties published one lackluster article.

Then came the Sam Fender interview.

Parts of the left jumped on it to say, yes you are right oh wise one, we never talk about class, and proceeded to talk for days about class, as per usual.

But what is class to the academic, online or activist left? They don't acknowledge their own class but will opine about the working class, who they deem wholly white, ad infinitum.

In my experience the white working class have more in common with the black and brown working classes than any other white community. We went to school together, live together and work together. But you wouldn't know that to hear white middle class commentators.

‘Like if we want to talk about ID politics, lets talk about who gets to be seen as part of the 'real working class' and why

The 'white working class' as a political identity is a far better example of ID politics undermining solidarity, than anything being mentioned.’

- Ife

I came across some person on Bluesky bloviating on about how "We need to get the working class onside". I told him he's an idiot and sent him this screenshot.

The #IPPscandal is the perfect storm of how all governments treat white working-class men and women.

I would expect the ‘left wing’ to be talking about it, prisons, and the criminal justice system if you are serious about "bringing the (white) working class onside”.

Talk about poverty and schooling. E.g Poorer high-ability kids fall behind peers at school from age 11.

'After the early years of secondary school, those of low-income backgrounds were more likely to have contact with the police, lower self-esteem, and negative attitudes towards education.’

we’re acting like misogyny, racism and queerphobia etc don’t predate privilege discourse.

The right are telling the white working class that the realise they are struggling is because of EDI and immigration

You can't challenge that by accepting that framing and going 'yeah we've all become too woke’

- Dezza

A necessary intervention from the author Shanice Octavia McBean, saying that she has been ‘part of projects to build working class power, bring together new coalitions and develop better frameworks’ gave me a book recommendation for something I will ACTUALLY buy and read.

‘We never talk about class" is the left's version of the right’s, "We never talk about immigration".

It's categorically not true, but people act like it is to show they're 'serious' and pander to groups they want to engage. This is why everyone's only providing random cherry picked examples of poor phrased tweets by 500-follower accounts and Union meetings a friend of a friend went to.

We're engineering and misdiagnosing the problem , because it appeals to right wing talking points. Much easier to say that 'the lefts gone woke and tells white men they're evil', than actually engage in difficult conversations about the caputring of young white men by the right, and how we tackle that.

Nuance doesn't go viral or sell.

- Dezza

And that's it. Everyone is selling something and none of it is solutions.

Here's Richard Pryor on How the Ruling Class Exploits Racism to Prevent Black and White Working-Class Americans from Forming a United Front

Next time I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in, I won't be drawn in…

Here's some instructions on how to set up your own anti-raids group

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P.S I know there is going to be some non-black women and /or middle class women who try to take my experiences and use them as their own. Trust me, I will hunt you down if you do and you will catch these hands.