THE BRITISH state, at best, has always had a two-faced attitude towards multiculturalism. On the one hand it likes to trumpet the supposed "tolerance" at the heart of British culture.
MANY HAVE feared that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has lost something of its cutting edge as it has grown ever larger. Yet, as this year's festival approached, we began hearing concerns about the number of shows with 11 September related themes. Most of the criticism was directed at the idea that comedians would make jokes about 9-11.
REPORTS OF war crimes began circulating within days of Israeli tanks rolling into the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in April this year. There were dozens of eyewitness accounts of people buried alive as their homes were bulldozed, and of women and children shot dead in the streets. The friends and families of the victims had to wait for four months until the UN produced a report on events in Jenin. The report has serious weaknesses.
UP UNTIL now the events of 11 September 2001 have produced little in the world of popular music other than jingoistic flag-waving by certain second and third rate US musicians.
IT'S EASY to laugh at the Tories. Last week they were going through yet another round in the Life of Brian type internal squabbles that have reduced them to an unelectable rump. Only the saddest kind of political scientist could take a genuine interest in working out what the ideological differences are between Iain Duncan Smith and sacked party chairman David Davis.
HAVE YOU ever given a future Archbishop of Canterbury a lift home from an anti-war event? Perhaps not-unless you were in South Wales some five years ago. There you could have seen bishop Rowan Williams leave a meeting against the bombing of Iraq and calmly accept sharing a car with several Socialist Workers Party members.
A GREAT crash shook the British labour movement last week-one that sounded almost like the fall of the Berlin Wall back in November 1989. Derek Simpson's election as general secretary of the engineering and electrical section of the giant Amicus union is more than the latest in a series of left wing union victories.
ON 16 November 1999 Jermaine Lee, a black Birmingham postal worker, took his own life. He was 26 years old. Last week the legal investigation into the case came to its conclusion. It revealed a terrifying level of racist harassment at the Aston sorting office where Jermaine worked. There is a powerful myth that racism is generated by the "uneducated" and "ignorant" people at the bottom of society. The people higher up are allegedly more "liberal".
I HAD to speak at a meeting last week with a title that seemed to be quite daft- "Is the recession over before it began?" This was on a day that saw massive panic on the stockmarkets, and after George Bush had said he was worried about "how tender the system can be". He's been on television twice since to try to reassure the American people. On each occasion the result has been to increase the sense of panic. It has a much bigger political impact in the US than here. That's because the nonsense about "people's capitalism" has conned many more people there.
DURING THE early 1980s I used to DJ at this jazz funk club in Watford called the New Penny. One night two scrawny young men approached me clasping a seven-inch record, which they claimed they had just finished recording. They begged me to play it. I agreed. They cleared the floor and treated the crowd to a mime and dance routine that had us all in stitches.
WHAT DID the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrial countries do last week while they skulked behind massive police protection at Kananaskis, deep in the Canadian Rockies? The British government had been busily briefing that they would deliver the "Marshall Plan for Africa" that Tony Blair promised at the disastrous G8 summit in Genoa last year.
THE TRADE Justice Movement brought thousands of people to Westminster to lobby their MPs on Wednesday of last week. They demanded a fair deal for the Third World. International development secretary Clare Short was quick to claim that the demonstrators were supporting the rich countries' campaign for free trade:
