Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 15

Innocent Crime

It was too late to do a u-turn. The officer’s eyes were already fixed on her, indifferently weighing her guilt – or just checking her out – it was hard to tell the innocuous from the threatening when they were in uniform. Either way she’d have to face it out, force her legs to keep moving forward with the steady ease they’d had before she’d turned the corner into the station and run into the wall of authority. Hard to do when her knees were mutineers, almost collapsing on themselves as they battled to turn away and run.

She tried not to look at him as she approached, although her eyes strained to read his expression. Was he bored? Just there because he’d been told to be and happy to idly wave the crowd through? Or was he measuring her, judging her and the rest of them – eager to catch someone out and feel his duty was done? Which one would be better for her? A bored man could still stop her, a keen one could still judge her as irrelevant. She glanced at him, trying to read everything in an instant and failing.

It only took seconds and she was there, within a couple of feet of him, a few seconds that felt long enough to tear her down but far too short for her to ready herself. Would he stop her? Should she stop before he asked? Or would that be an admission of guilt that wasn’t even asked for? The other commuters were seemingly oblivious as they drifted through the strung out line of officers at the entrance, all innocent perhaps, or just better at looking it. While she could feel herself glowing red, steps uneven as he kept his eyes on her.

Within arms reach now. Any second and she’d be finished, a hand would grab her, then the questions and then stolen away to… He nodded, his eyes meeting hers, still hard and blank, but then she was through. No looking back, no hesitation, again she had to force her body not to slump in relief or turn to cast a glance at the fate she’d just escaped. She was part of the crowd again now, she needed to be as indifferent to the check point as the rest of them were, just another face among many, another commuter walking away from the day and returning to normality.

Calypso Rose – Calypso Queen

New to me but Calypso Rose is, apparently, an institution. Long may she reign as Queen of Calypso…

Byron Burgers & Immigration

Byron burgers gets dozens of its own employees deported.

On the 4th of July, workers across 15 Byron restaurants were called in for a training at 9.30. 5 minutes after start, 2 immigration enforcement officers for the Home Office arrived, carrying lists of names and photos. They started calling people into a room one by one.

A manager in Byron unashamedly explained ‘We know what’s going on here. We prepared this.’

Dozens of workers were arrested, and deported that same name. Most of them were Latin American.

Here’s what Byron said when contacted by El Iberico:

“Byron confirms that several of our London restaurants were visited by representatives of the Interior Ministry earlier this week . The Interior Ministry recognizes that Byron, as an employer, meets the requirements of immigration law in their procedure for hiring workers. In Byron we are proud of the diversity in the staff of our restaurants built around people of all backgrounds. We have a long and close collaboration with the Ministry of Interior , to cooperate fully with them throughout the course of the investigations currently carried out and that will be in the future. “

A quick search on the internet tells me that no other media outlet is talking about that. Let’s change that.

The above is one of the few write ups I could find of a recent immigration bust on Byron Burgers. There’s a Spanish language report over at El Iberico too. I know this is a bit out of the usual and I’m not planning to make too much of a habit of posting random news items but this seems to have been ignored in most places so I figured I’d throw it out there.

Why does it matter? Because in working with a business that illegally employed undocumented workers the Immigration authorities have thrown the weight of guilt directly onto workers. It tells business that they can get away with breaking immigration law as long as they’re willing to throw up a few scapegoats if they get caught out. And it tells workers that their bosses are willing and now able to barter them away to avoid any repercussions they should be facing. It does nothing to stop dodgy practices, but it does make those workers even more easily exploitable. At the same time it gives politicians and the authorities an easy way to look ‘tough’ on illegal immigration without undermining the cheap labour market that their peers in business increasingly rely on.

It’s an example which extends beyond employment too – landlords for example have been known to use the threat of deportation to coerce or force poor conditions on tenants. Again, shifting all responsibility to the individuals who’re just living their lives while removing all responsibility from those profiting from it.

Sadly there’s no doubt going to be more stuff like this coming out as Theresa May looks for stories to re-enforce her ‘tough’ position on immigration.

Get Busy Winning or Get Busy Moaning

It’s a dramatic experience supporting Jeremy Corbyn. One day you’re a Stalinist thug, the next a near-fascist misogynist, the next a naive idealist, then you’re backing an ineffectual old man, or a sinister dictator, or a street fighting gangster – every day is a lucky dip of contradictory images. Sure, let this run long enough and there’ll be stories leaking out about Corbyn supporters being the secret descendants of an ancient alien race. Here to purge the Earth in advance of an invasion by our own species of giant Revolutionary Socialist ants – but I’m sure they won’t figure that one out for a while yet.

Momentum’s re-enactment society does ‘The Storming of the Winter Palace’

There is one consistent theme though, one axiomatic truth that those supporting the coup seem to cling to like a life boat on the Titanic they’ve created for themselves – even if their words contradict their belief. It’s that we don’t want to win. We don’t know how to win, we wouldn’t know what winning looked like if it kicked us up the arse whilst singing ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. Granted, they acknowledge, we do want to terrify, brutalise, intimidate and text them into submission in our blind fervor to keep Corbyn as leader – but we don’t really want to win do we? Not properly, not really, not like they do. We don’t want to win over The Sun, or win over pro-austerity Conservatives, or win friends in the House of Commons bars and if you don’t want those sort of victories then you may as well just give up now.

As media lines go it’s a slightly confused one, as they try to make their opposition seem at once both ruthlessly opportunistic, Machiavellian and nearly nihilistically defeatist in the face of a challenge. It’s understandable though, I think. For a lot of those on the Labour Right (Progress, Maquis, Continuity, Provisional Labour, Blairites – whatever you want to call them) ‘winning’ is a very small thing. It’s the outcome of a closed door competition, where the only valid measures of victory are rarefied and defined by a sealed circle within the political class. ‘Winning’ is to wrestle power away from the honorable member opposite even if you do nothing more or less with it than they do. It makes sense, in a certain light, because it’s a system of victories which radiates from a monopolised source of power – everyone who participates knows the rules, knows the tactics and knows the firm limitations of the outcomes. If you’re a participant why would you ever contemplate bigger goals? It’s a world of competition more than big enough to consume your attentions after all and if you’re in it there’s nothing immoral about it, you can play the game with full certainty that you’re the good guy and as long as you stick with the players you’ll never hear otherwise.

The problem that way of thinking faces, at the moment, is that there’s been a huge influx of attention, energy and desire from a whole load of people who’ve never been part of that closed world and who never will be. It’s like a strangely inverted form of gentrification – those in parliament and around the political class are seeing their comfortable little dramas and conflicts being overwhelmed by a huge influx of outsiders who want to knock it all down and open up a string of Socialist coffee shops and artisan Workers’ cake shops. It’s a new population who have scaled up the entire notion of ‘winning’ from a parochial, insular affair into something far bigger and – as far as I’m concerned – far more important concept.

The established rules of recent decades don’t mean much to these new neighbours. They don’t want to compromise on NHS privatisation, they don’t want to compromise on attacks on social services or benefits – they don’t want to ‘get along’ with the pro-austerity lot next door. And you can see why that would be disconcerting if you’ve been sitting near to the source of power long enough to feel comfortably at home with those sort of compromises.

A normal man who drinks normally from a normal mug, just like you.

We’ve had their reaction now, after a false start or two. It’s a refusal to pay attention, more or less. It’s Owen Smith. Without a trace of awareness their Great Hope comes in the form of more of the same, albeit with added protestations of being ‘Left Wing’, lip service to a new presence in the political world which can’t be convincing even to those putting him forward. He can win though, that’s the line, maybe they even believe it, narrow as their definition of victory is. As I said though, it’s a small, mediocre notion of victory, one that challenges and gains nothing beyond a warm glow of satisfaction in a small quarter. But it is one which Smith is a perfect model for. A former Pfizer lobbyist, open to privatisation within the NHS, eager to maintain the rules of political movement within the status quo, open to reciting the mantras of a Socialist party without ever needing to act on or fight for them. He’s a reflection of the halcyon days the Labour Right long for, the days of Blair, the days of management where the community of power was small and all too often unnoticed by too many of us. He represents politics as they feel it should be, sensible and codified in a way they can understand and control.

Unfortunately he won’t win. He won’t win in the Party and he wouldn’t win with the general electorate. The times have changed, people have remembered that they should, in theory, have some say in the political landscape of this country. Brexit was just the tip of that particular iceberg and it’s not going to melt away any time soon. People no longer care about the Parliamentary traditions of closed door conflict, they want to know that winning actually means something, they want to know that things can actually get better for people, that they can actually bring about positive change and resist the negative – not just play through the motions of success as if it ended at the boundaries of Westminster. They even, shock of shocks, want to see politics take place outside of the halls of power – they want to see opposition, and government, manifested in the daily struggles of life, drawing power down and out to where they can see, feel and use it to protect and improve their own lives.

So they’re going to fight. They’re going to fight until they do win because within Labour, within the electorate and within the political world as a whole people are realising what victory should be – and they’re wondering why the politicians they have are so reluctant to try to attain it.

Some Images

Some images trawled from the last year or so of this blog, posted for no reason in particular.

Fear and Loathing in Las Labour

I’m not sure that there’s much point in trying to write about the political landscape around the Labour Party at the moment. Sure, by the time I reach the end of this sentence Angela Eagle could have been found jamming an ice pick into Jeremy Corbyn while Hillary Benn launches an armed uprising on Clapham Common. Which would be interesting, to be sure, but it also makes a bit of a joke of any attempts to step back and survey things with any sort of clarity. Still, there’s no escaping the compulsion to try and figure things out as they progress so I’ll do what I can, all on the assumption that I won’t find myself disappeared and this post airbrushed out of history by the Labour NEC.

The word for the day, it seems, is ‘intimidation’. Apparently hoards of throwbacks from Stalin’s purges are storming the gates of Labour luminaries and with flaming torches and sharpened pitch forks terrifying them into capitulation. Or something along those lines. Certainly victims and their defenders are popping up at every turn, outraged by the actions of Corbyn supporters seemingly out to harass them into subservience. And it is, almost always, Corbyn supporters alluded to (though rarely, if ever, named) – which is nice, at least it keeps things simple.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. I certainly didn’t set out to at least. Not so long ago, just prior to being demoted to a slogan for opportunists, an MP was murdered. It was an abhorrent act, one that should offend everyone of every political persuasion and it’s proof positive that there are those who see hate-fuelled violence as a political tactic worth considering. Unfortunately cynicism has set in though. A shocker to those who know me I’m sure.

There are people who think an expression of their personal hate or insanity is a valid act, we know those people when we see them and we detest them too. It’s one of those happy cases where general human morality, mostly, converges in agreement. There are also more subtle forms of self-justifying moral corruption though. Forms which don’t openly act on negative ideals but which do manipulate and profit from them – taking the abhorrent and turning it into a strategic asset in a way that demeans real horrors and insults real victims. That’s what seems to be occurring with ever increasing frequency in the political world at the moment. Fear, intimidation, bullying – all real things, all things that should be disdained and combated at every turn – have been suborned into the role of political gambit. Catch all terms to negate uncomfortable responsibilities and to neuter understandable anger in a way that relegates those in real positions of fear or discomfort to auxiliary roles as totemic examples, symbols to be pointed at to justify any and all manipulations, no matter how cynical.

I know it’s walking a fine line to say that at the moment, in the eyes of some at least. That’s why I’m not planning to call out any particular individuals. Who knows how any one person may take an experience, perhaps in some cases the declared fear is real and the concern honest even if I can see no real strength in the accusations made. It’d be futile cynicism to start challenging every case as if there was an easy list of guilty parties to be drawn up. What I will do though is point to end results which I do feel are manifestations of a deeply unpleasant appropriation of suffering – the end goals for a greater or lesser number of people who’re eagerly corrupting legitimate concerns into their own service.

A few days ago the Labour NEC met to discuss Corbyn’s place on the leadership ballot and whether he was automatically guaranteed a spot. To me, as to a lot of others, this was a pointless debate. Not one defined by honest confusion, but an attempt to secure a new avenue by which to force him into submission or, at worst, a protracted legal battle which might have further exhausted both the man himself and his support. The meeting went ahead though and we all waited patiently on the results. It was along the way that news of the vote on a secret ballot was broken – NEC members, representatives of party membership and Trade Unions were asking for their decisions to be anonymous ones, driven by an apparent fear of intimidation and bullying.

As I said, I can’t speak to the concerns and fears of individuals involved – although there’s been plenty in the press and from some of them for anyone curious to come to their own conclusions. What I can say though is that to have a secret ballot was a slap to the face of the democratic process. Accountability, in all representative decision making processes, is built on openness. That’s why the voting records of MPs are recorded and shared for all the world to see, because without knowing what they do there’s no method by which to judge them, for better or worse. Even taking all self-avowed reasoning at face value there’s still no defence for breaking the democratic process for the sake of fear – to do that is to capitulate to it. Something which I highly doubt those wilfully endorsing limits on openness and discussion would be willing to do if the circumstances seemed more in their favour.

It’s an approach that’s spreading increasingly wider too. In discussions I’ve seen the prevalent threat has become that of accusation. Honest discussion ends up stifled by the overhanging threat of being branded as a bully, not because of any real act but simply because a climate has been created where to proclaim a concern, no matter how slight, is enough to condemn your opposite. It’s a tactic so far removed from the realities of fear and suffering that it becomes an insult to them. Detracting from real experiences to the point where genuine victims – on both sides – will no doubt end up being lost in the mix of opportunism and propagandistic accusation.

Since that NEC meeting hundreds of thousands of new members have been disenfranchised, a CLP branch has been suspended and countless column inches have been given over to apocalyptic declarations about the violence and thuggishness of those who support Jeremy Corbyn – a mild mannered Social Democrat who dresses like a teacher. All with the undertone, or overt assertion, that it’s made necessary because of real harassment and legitimate fear. Again, it’s pointless to speculate on individual measures of honesty in these accusations but as with the secret ballot the end result is enough to make certain judgements. For those new members, for those branch members, for those looking to engage in the democratic process of the Labour Party these accusations have the same outcome as a direct attack on their rights. And whether you’re even mildly cynical and doubtful of the motivations behind it or absolutely willing to believe in their honest intent these results are still an insult to what the Party and democracy as a whole should stand for.

Waiting for you in the car park after last orders…

Things have started to get paranoid now – an obvious side effect and one which some at least are no doubt relishing. If you support Corbyn and a Left Wing Labour Party then now’s the time to watch what you say, to watch what you write and to watch who you associate with. Guidelines have appeared from the NEC Procedures Committee laying out the various reasons why a registered supporter might be suspended. People are growing wary of new Facebook requests and Twitter followers. They’re waiting for denunciations to start flying as the struggle for the future of the Party goes on. And if this is the result of real fear then that fear has won out already, to the cost of the Party and society as a whole. And if it’s due to less decent motivations? Then the struggle to maintain that ‘kinder politics’ and ‘comradely’ approach is getting harder every day because I can think of little more disgusting than the sort of manipulation that profits from past cruelty to serve itself.

Either way it does nothing to make me want to back down – nor should it any of us.

Side note: This is just a small slice of what’s happening. There’s plenty to be said about the tenuous thinking behind the new £25 fee for supporters, the closing of Union and affiliate voting paths, the stupidly complex registration system and voting qualifications… but that’s for another day. Would also like to add that I’ve done my best to be moderate here, although it might be obvious that I’m more than a little pissed off by it all. That’s not through any sense that I need to hold my tongue or watch what I say but as I said above, the accusations are flying at the moment and the fewer gaps are left for over-excited objection the better. And as another side note there’s a new Tory Cabinet, Boris Johnson is Grand High Racist in charge of the Foreign Office and if ever the world needed a united resistance to that it’s now. Here’s hoping things get resolved soon enough for Labour and the Left to offer it, because that’s where the real fight lies.

Entertainment for the Braindead – Sleep

A bit of beauty in these harsh times. Highly recommend everything Julia Kotowski (EftBD) has ever done, all beautiful, all worth hearing. All free too, so even better.

What Monsters?

What monsters are we?

What monsters to stare at the barbed and crushing

cruel and devouring

dead and decayed

reflections of our own comfort

and cry disgust

setting thick lines and stark colours

as clear divides

between ourselves

and what we say should never be

but is,

eternally and always

as monsters set forth

from our own guts

formed in our own bile

evolved in the shadow of our own denial

that we should stare

from safe enclosures

and lament

that those beasts should exist

so close to our certain innocence

Deny Hate

Close your eyes to hate,

pretend that in that blindness

there lies a beauty

silent, simple and clean

Ignore the echoes of anger manifest

as abhorrent intrusions

on your serene

and solitary preserve

Speak only to condemn

to deny all sins

as sorry reflections

of depraved souls

and closed hearts

disdainful to see,

painful to hear

and no part of your state

but deserving of the condemnation

you set forth to ring out

in the blocked ears

of the cruel

and callous

who stand beyond the barrier

around your purity

wallowing in their weakness

Do all of that

and be a Saint,

secluded and perfect

immersed in a beauty all of your own,

untouched,

unsullied

and clean

behind iron gates

and slowly clouded memory

But as you rest in clear skies,

floating easy in mind’s fair creation

amidst holy light

and crystalline clouds

refracting peaceful thought

into peaceful light

remember that you do deny yourself

a clarity

and cutting, grinding certainty

that is given free to those

whose eyelids are cut away

by necessary vigilance,

never to evade, avoid or escape

that thing left beyond you,

a beauty far removed

from your serene Sainthood

A beauty which permits no solitude

no escape

no civil silence

A beauty of hate

expressed in unison

with glory drawn

from each observer

and made into palatial wholes

where ideas may live

with a grasp and passion

beyond all you have allowed yourself

and beauty which,

for all your defences,

will endure in universal state

until you open your eyes

and admit that even this evil

has a beauty beyond measure

that no Saint can evade,

escape

or

deny

How to Live

Dredge

dig

exploit

for beauty’s sake

with a retelling

that turns passion into parable

person into picture

and place into history

frayed and digestible

crisp and gone

in deep inhalations

by jealous consumers

eager to live

but terrified of living

save by

dredging

digging

and exploiting