Category: anti-racism
Tower Hamlets council: ‘Eric Pickles has abused his powers’
The following statement appeared on Left Unity’s website about the blatant attack by the Coalition government on the right to residents of Tower Hamlets to elect a council and Mayor that these hypocritical racists disapprove of.
It is worth noting, that Pickles, like most of his parliamentary cohorts in the Tory Party, and many Lib-Dems as well, is a supporter of the ‘Friends of Israel’ faction within his party, which in the Tories embraces 80% of Tory MPs.
This attack on democracy is somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of the Israeli government when, in some semi-democratic body, Palestinians elect politicians the Zionists disapprove of.
Pickles seems to be intent on bringing the norms of West Bank ‘democracy’ to East London
“Pete Green of Left Unity said:
“Eric Pickles has abused his powers and revealed a contempt for the democratic vote in Tower Hamlets by sending in three commissioners to oversee the council’s actions.
“The audit, demanded by local Labour MPs who feel threatened by the success of mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets First in the local elections, has found no evidence of criminality or fraud.
The shifting face of 21st Century capitalist racism
Down with all racial hierarchies!
There is a major contradiction at the heart of modern capitalist ideology today when it comes to questions involving the social construct of ‘race’. One pole of the contradiction is that advanced capitalist governments in the West are increasingly insistent that racism is a thing of the past, that unlike their predecessors, they are opposed in principle to racism, and that racism is against the essence of liberal capitalist meritocratic ideology. This strain of bourgeois ideology depends on an abstract model of a market economy where someone’s money, no matter their colour or origin, is as good as anyone else’s, and anyone can enjoy the rewards of the ‘hard work’ which supposedly enables capitalist ‘success’.
But while this ideology is propagated, massive racial inequalities persist, hierarchies remain and are unyielding for nearly all ethnic minority populations. It is still true that particularly non-white minorities in all the advanced capitalist countries all suffer from disproportionate rates of unemployment, low-pay when employed, precarious employment, lack of access to quality education, disproportionate levels of ill-health and greater difficulty accessing quality health care. Such minorities are also disproportionately subjected to police and state violence, to deaths in custody and at the hands of the police in general.
In the United States, where America’s first black President is in his second term, the recent protests against the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri, have once again underlined that for American blacks, despite Obama and all his works, racial oppression very much remains and continues unabated. The Missouri case is one of so many over so many years and decades; it is telling that even now such things can explode into significant struggles. If society had really changed for the better in some fundamental sense, as the ideologues of capitalism claim, then there is no way that such major conflicts could erupt between large sections of a traditionally oppressed minority and the forces of the state.
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