Cameron's immigration spiel posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on Cameron's latest immigration spiel:

The increasing frequency with which Cameron is turning to immigration as a rallying theme is arresting. He needs it to inject excitement into a dysphoric party faithful and revive the flagging ideological props of the administration. He sidelined the anti-immigrant xenophobes before 2009. Now his speeches are increasingly littered with demagoguery – anecdotes about forced marriage being used to evade immigration controls being an example of note-perfect Powellism – and pander to the chauvinist sentiment once characterised by Christopher Hitchens as "John Bullshit".

Cameron may grow more attached to such rhetoric as the ideological self-confidence of the government evaporates, and as it becomes more embattled by adverse economic and political conditions. But the danger for him in doing so is that he isn't very good at it. His "toughness" looks ersatz because it is; his promises seem phoney because they are; he is unconvincing because he is unconvinced by his own rhetoric. There are others on the right who know better how to play with this fire, and Cameron is arguably giving them the ammunition with which to depose him when the time comes.

Labels: 'integration', chauvinism, class, immigration, john bullshit, racism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

You aint from round here... posted by Richard Seymour

Islamophobia Watch draws attention to a depressingly dim column by the occasionally sharp Matthew Parris. The whole thing is a tiresome whinge, culminating in this disingenuous musing:

Would it be wrong to try to convey to communities in Britain who adopt the full hijab that, though it is a woman's legal right to dress as she chooses, she should recognise that she's in a country where many people will find a masked face disturbing, and that (without meaning to) she is acting in a culturally inappropriate manner, which may offend?

One is struck, powerfully, by how pathetic this is. If you are offended, or even disturbed, by someone covering a part of their face, I strongly suggest you seek treatment. Failing that, I suggest you keep it quiet, and try to remain indoors as much as possible. The modern world was not made for such precious creatures. But this attitude is also most telling. After all, the objection to the hijab/niqab/burqa (such sartorial distinctions evidently don't matter if the garments are assumed to be cut from the same evil cloth) is supposedly a universalist one. It supposedly has some connection with women's rights. Behind it all, though, one consistently finds a cowardly authoritarianism, a desire to regulate the apparel of Muslim women on behalf of that dowdy particularism known as 'British values'. Such values, where they do not amount to an assertion of the inviolable rights of property, seem to involve being bourgeois, conformist, timid, insular, and pig-ignorant. Would it be wrong to try to convey to Matthew Parris and those of his ideological persuasion that this is not the 1950s? That while it is their legal right to believe and even write whatever lame nonsense occurs to them, they should realise that they live in a society where many people will find their paranoia ludicrous? And that, without meaning to, they are confirming what everyone already knew - which is that Britain doesn't have a culture?

Labels: 'british values', 'integration', 'veil', cultural relativism, islam, islamophobia, particularism, universalism, women