Red Pepper is a magazine I read a lot, although don’t always buy; it usually contains thought-provoking political discussion which is radical without being crazy. In the current issue, there is an article (not online) from Hind Hassan, a member of Student Respect (I’m not sure if that’s the Galloway or SWP faction; her website links to what appears to be the Galloway faction’s website) but writing personally, about the recolonisation of the National Union of Students by New Labour. This is something I have personally witnessed in the 1990s, as I was involved in student politics then as well.

I was a delegate to the 1996 conference, which is best known as the conference at which the NUS abandoned its commitment to restoring pre-Thatcher maintainance grant levels. (A maintainance grant is an amount of money a student receives from the state for rent and keep; the amount had been frozen during the 1980s, such that by the time I got to university, those who got it at all, which many did not, found that it did not even cover their rent.) As I recall, the NUS passed a motion abandoning this commitment, with the Labour student group insisting that the NUS could not be in the debate on education funding unless they presented “reasonable” ideas, and that many of those who demanded a return to the 1970s did not want to be in the debate; they were just putting forward “transitional demands” to make the NUS into a vehicle for a Marxist revolution. The proposals which were actually passed were somewhat vague, and shortly after the conference wound up, Labour announced that they would introduce tuition fees for the first time.

Many unions at the time were dominated by the Labour student group, and three successive presidents went on to become Labour MPs; the president at the time was Jim Murphy, who was elected to a Scottish constituency in 1997 and has just become the new Scottish Secretary (i.e. the cabinet member with responsibility for Scotland, a position less powerful than it once was because of the devolved Scottish government, but a cabinet member all the same). His two predecessors, Lorna Fitzsimmons and Stephen Twigg, also became Labour MPs. It was widely suspected at our union, where Plaid Cymru was the biggest single faction, that the NUS and many of its local bodies and affiliated student unions were functioning as Labour politicians’ training grounds. We actually disaffiliated from the local NUS area, called Deheubarth after an ancient Welsh kingdom, on the grounds of its ineffectiveness and because the convenor was deemed to be a “waste of space” who held the students in “total contempt”; the Welsh Labour hacks were known as “no-necks” in reference to the physical appearance of one of their executive.

Our magazine in Abersywyth, the Courier, printed a substantial article in February 1997 which stated that they had received hand-written notes by Mat Davies, then NUS Wales’s President, which stated: “our main objective will be to assist the Labour party [to] win the [1997] General Election … not only [does this] go without saying, but it is largely why our key activists have sought election or re-election to positions of influence”, namely paid or “sabbatical” student officers, so-called because they take a year or two out of their studies, at local student unions. As for Labour party controlling the NUS, he wrote that “controlling the political agenda of a major union of two and half million members which isn’t a threat to an incoming government - or the government itself - cannot be a bad thing”. An example of local corruption from Liverpool was offered, in which representatives were chosen for the union without consultation or election, a large picture of Tony Blair appeared in the union handbook and a Labour slogan - “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” - appeared on the union’s rape alarms.

The particular circumstances which kept Labour mostly out of power in Aber presented their own problems, as I’ve outlined in the past, but I still think our situation preferable to having a union which mostly serves wannabe politicians. The first time I went into conference, I noticed one of the executive stand up - Helen Garrod, if my memory serves me correctly - and a couple of seconds later, the audience started cheering and applauding, precisely as if they had been directed to do so, which is exactly what I later discovered had been going on: someone was sitting in the balcony above and giving directions to the Labour students as to how to vote. (When a delegate from a dissenting union tried to get the visitors removed for this reason, Jim Murphy opposed him, saying that there were dignitaries among the visitors; the motion was, of course, defeated.) The problem was that the only opposition in the NUS was dominated by hard-left groups like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Socialist Worker, which made it easy for the Labour organisation to rubbish them. After I signed up for the Campaign for Free Education after conference, I got junk mail from the AWL through my door.

So, the political compromising of the NUS is not new - indeed, it died down for a while, after Labour found it had no use for the NUS after they won the 1997 election - and neither are the circumstances which allowed it: the fact that ordinary students do not care much who runs their union. This allows activists and politicians a free run, with sometimes unpleasant consequences - such as the time our union was mandated by a General Meeting (whose quorum was 70, which meant a policy motion could be passed by just 36 people, out of a student population of 6,000) to hold a rent strike, which was not honoured by most of the students. It is what leads to student meetings being used to settle personal scores, to people being hauled in front of disciplinary committees for saying things deemed to be racist or sexist while offensive statements from “oppressed” people are tolerated (and the union Rag group still prints jokes in their annual magazine about paedophiles and, ahem, what lesbians and feminists alike need), and to policies being passed which reflect the views of an activist minority but not the general population, such as the one our union had, specifying a union policy of demanding free abortion on demand, and mandating all elected officers not to deviate from it.

Hind Hassan contends that the NUS is being driven towards becoming a consortium of student unions, rather than a representative body for students, and that even locally, commercial interests are being put before a union’s campaigning role; reforms are being attempted based on proposals from non-student consultants. This is also something I encountered at Aberystwyth; the proposal we received from such a consultancy, formed of former union staffers, included reducing the number of sabbatical officers from eight to five, as “the law of diminishing returns applies” above that number. The proposals included “the transfer of ultimate power and veto within [the NUS] to a ‘trustee board’ made up of ‘external’ individuals such as lawyers and accountants”. This had already happened at her local union, at which she was the sabbatical equality and diversity officer; since this made her a trustee, she was expected to sign an agreement not to make any decisions “to the union’s financial detriment”, preventing her from campaigning against the NUS’s “multi-million pound contracts with unethical manufacturers”; the trustees could also overturn any decision made “by students” (the union is governed by a representative council, with annual general meetings) if they stood to “jeopardise the union’s reputation”, which she interprets as meaning “having a non-mainstream political opinion”; despite being an officer for equality and diversity, she was required to put aside any commitment to minority students while acting as a trustee (although the Leeds University Union by-laws - see page 32 - do not actually mention minorities, rather they mention equal opportunities and diversity; it also does not say that the officer must be part of any minority). The proposal for the NUS, she alleges, contains no representation on the trustee board for minority students at all.

The problem that unions, both national and local, face is that they have their fingers in two separate pies - student campaigning and representation, and being commercial enterprises, running union shops, bars and entertainment, and they often conflict, with some students coming into the union to drink or to see a band, and never turning up for a General Meeting, while some might give up much of their free time for a non-sabbatical union role while almost never eating or drinking at the union’s bars. Perhaps student unions in England and Wales should be split along the same lines as occurs in Scottish universities, in which the “Unions” which run bars are completely separate from student representation and welfare, which are funded by grants from the university. That way, nobody will need to worry about any negative effect their campaigning might have on the companies with offices downstairs or sales of drinks at the bar. After this, the NUS itself should go through a similar demerger, so that the representative wing will have no excuse for turning itself into a mere commercial endeavour. That will not solve the problem of party manipulation, however; that will only happen when students at certain universities wise up to the fact that the Labour student organisation does not represent students, but only their “activists” and their personal ambitions.

One of the higher-profile figures in the campaign against the new embryology laws is Nadine Dorries, Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire (the area north of Luton, containing Flitwick and Ampthill). Dorries turned up very late in the programme, with Modell telling her some things she might like to know about her evangelical lobbyist. Modell said something about fundamentalists having access to power and influence and Dorries replied, “are you calling me power and influence?”, but then said people with the opposite view had such access as well and that MPs are there for everyone. When Modell revealed the friends the evangelical lobbyist had in the fundamentalist Christian community in front of both of them, the lobbyist paused and then ended the interview.

The lobbyist was Andrea Minichiello Williams, public policy director of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship. Modell had shown the LCF giving an audience to Sam Solomon, a supposed former Muslim and expert on Islam who told the audience that Islam is based on one word - hate - and that even apparently decent and hospitable Muslims will go and slaughter once the ‘need’ arises, as his Nigerian former neighbours did, and that the closer you get to the Islamic sources, the more radical and hateful you become. Another well-known evangelical agitator, Steven Green, was shown leading a small group of people in a prayer outing to somewhere near the proposed site of the Abbey Mills Mosque, praying against “this symbol of Islam, this symbol of oppression”, and opining that “Allah is Satan” and making other derogatory remarks about Islam. Modell had not done enough research to be able to tell him that Christians in the Arab world use the Name, Allah, as well.

Also towards the end of the programme, a meeting in a room in the House of Commons was shown in which a few female pro-“choice” activists had managed to infiltrate. They started heckling, “women’s rights are human rights”, and Ms Williams was shown encouraging her supporters to stand up and applaud. The infiltrators, however, were pulled out of their seats by male guards and one of them was shown being dragged out along the floor by the arm. Modell then interviewed Stephen Green again, who told us that he feared that this country would face war in thirty or forty years’ time if the Muslim population grows, because people would not want to live “under the yoke of Islam”.

I could not fail to notice some cheap shots against their religiosity, which is a different matter from their bigoted attitudes towards Islam. The daughter of one activist was shown sitting at the piano playing and singing a religious song, which may have been intended to provoke a contemptuous, condescending reaction from the intended sceptical audience, but in fact was not much different from the hymns I sang at Catholic school (admittedly, some of those are toe-curling, but this song was mild by comparison). Modell asked prurient and unnecessary questions of one of them about his sex life, remarking afterwards that he was struck by this man’s devotion to his faith and that such strong beliefs could lead to big things (I am paraphrasing here). However, their tactics and behaviour would put many people off; one very respectable-looking middle-aged man was shown at the beginning saying (regarding homosexuality) he did not want his twenty grand-children being old it was OK to get sh*t on your penis, which even some who might strongly disapprove of homosexuality might find to be an offensive, vulgar statement. They all seemed like a rather miserable bunch of men and really did not look as if the spirit was moving them.

The programme did show a sad fact about the British evangelicals’ attempt to construct a US-style “moral majority” in this country: that it cannot conceal its hatred for Islam when most Muslims would agree with them in many of their moral campaigns, such as their anti-abortion campaign and possibly even that against producing hybrid human-animal embryos. I am sure that the pro-choice lobby are beside themselves with glee at the sight of one group of their opponents effectively denouncing a group which is on the same side as them as devil-worshippers. Again, this is something Modell did not put to either Green or Williams; I do not know if this is because Modell had not done his homework or because he did not want to give them ideas; most likely it would have made no difference to them.

The documentary was revealing, but rather like Keith Allen’s documentary on the Westboro cult, let down by the presenter’s obvious lack of sympathy with his subjects and dislike of their religious beliefs; a journalist with less obvious sceptical views, and more knowledge about religion, might be better able to challenge these bigots’ views about other religious people rather than hold them up to public ridicule.

This picture appeared in the Observer today, on page 19 of the Review section next to this article by Miranda Sawyer. The article is about a programme on the BBC World Service called Europe’s Angry Young Muslims, about alienated young Muslims in Holland. As you can see, it shows a Muslim woman in a niqaab next to the quote:

‘Tolerance is not a positive thing’: Europe’s Angry Young Muslims on the World Service

Now, the World Service is a radio station and a set of radio broadcasts in various languages. It doesn’t have a TV station, and the picture does not appear on the programme’s website. So the conjecture is that it’s a library picture, chosen to be suitably scary next to a quote about how tolerance isn’t a good thing.

The fact is, niqab has nothing to do with anger; it does not coincide with extremist groups, political groups or particularly rigid sects; in fact, not all women belonging to such groups and sects wear niqab even if some such groups have an increased proportion of women who wear it. It is a form of dress which some scholars say is compulsory and some women wear because they believe this or because they believe it preferable, or because their husbands or fathers do, or because it’s the norm where they live. The use of the picture thus makes a false connection between niqab and extremism.

I’d like to encourage readers to write to the Observer’s readers’ editor (email: reader [at] observer.co.uk; postal address: The Observer, 3-7 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5EJ) to make these points. You might also write a letter to the editor (letters [at] observer.co.uk with subject “letters to the Editor”, fax 020 7837 7817). The Observer has a weekly corrections and clarifications section in which they post corrections to wrong statements and impressions in their articles, so if they get enough complaints, they may well publish a correction.

By all means reproduce this on websites and blogs, but do not start or forward chain emails. If you wish to re-display the image, please download and display it on your site rather than posting an image link to here, which saps my bandwidth, and let me know (indigojo_uk [at] yahoo.co.uk) in case the image needs to be taken down for legal reasons.

The Press Complaints Commission’s method of complaining about reports in the press which breach their code of practice is first to complain to the editor, and then to complain to them if they do not reply. The Express has not responded to the complaint I emailed them last week. It has printed no letters in response to their article or their leader. (It has, incidentally, printed a letter about the plight of some thousands of Christians being persecuted in Eritrea by someone who apparently thought Eritrea is under Muslim control, which it is not - something which could have been found out very easily before printing that letter. The victims are likely to be Evangelicals or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the dominant Christian denomination is the local Orthodox Church.)

I therefore intend to complain to the PCC about these defamatory articles. I suggest other readers do the same. By the way, you will need to get hold of the offending edition (you may find copies in public libraries) and send the complaint by post. (Instructions for complaining are here on the PCC’s website.)

“This idea of community leadership is a complete nonsense. The Muslim Council of Britain purports to represent the Muslim community but what have they actually done to show leadership since 9/11? on all the major issues – on the 7/7 terror attacks, on the cartoon row they have hid behind the Home Office.

“It is now taken as read by the Government that these self-appointed groups really don’t have any power or influence over the Muslim populations. They got what they wanted from the Government but there was no real delivery in return. Now it is clear that they can’t deliver.”

The Express also printed an editorial, which I have reproduced from Osama’s blog:

Memo to the leaders of the Muslim community: it is time to stand up and take your place in the fight against terrorism now. For years we have been told that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Muslim community is as appalled as anyone else at the atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists and that it is only a small number of extremists who take to the streets carrying placards saying, “Behead all those who insult Islam”. Now the Muslim population of this country must make it clear that this is true. For, as we report today, the Government has lost faith in the ability of moderate Muslim leaders to lead the fight against Islamic extremists and, it is fair to say, it has a point.

Take the events of yesterday. Thousands of Muslims gathered in London to protest at the recent cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed – and yet not one of these cartoons has been published in a mainstream newspaper anywhere in the country. Where were these protesters when Ken Bigley was murdered and the results broadcast on the net? Where were they when disaffected youths set off suicide bombs on London’s transport system, killing and maiming untold others?

For far too long organisations such as the Muslim Council Of Britain and the Muslim Association Of Britain have remained silent in the face of atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. If they do not wish their religion to become synonymous in the public’s mind with barbarity, they must speak out now.

Three specific issues stand out from this editorial and the accusations made in the first article:

(1) It has always been well-known that Muslims have no ability to police their community. All of our organisations are voluntary, and none of them have official status or any ability to enforce their decisions on the Muslim community. This has always been the case. In the case of the MCB, its status has in fact increased in the past year or so since the bombings. When they were founded, they were dismissed in Q-News as a group of the same people whose faces turn up time after time in the Daily Jang.

In particular, the MCB cannot dictate what goes on in mosques, because they are run by quite separate organisations - usually one organisation per mosque. It cannot appoint or dismiss imams. And even when extremists are prohibited from teaching in mosques, they are able to hire community centres (as did a number of the extremists around Abu Qatada), preach in the street (as al-Muhajiroun did for many years) or take over mosques by force (as with Abu Hamza).

(2) There is a specific accusation that Muslim organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain “have remained silent in the face of atrocities carried out in the name of Islam”. This is a demonstrable untruth: MAB issued this press release condemning the bombings within hours of them happening. As for the MCB, they issued this joint statement with Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, dated 7th July 2005. So it is not true that they remained silent. Islamophobia Watch posted details of a number of condemnations of the bombings from a number of Muslim organisations; the reader might look at their weekly archive; the archive consists of several pages, and the links can be found from the fourth page. The appalling murder of Ken Bigley is also mentioned as an example of the community’s silence; however, the MAB was not in fact silent then and has been actively involved in attempting to secure the release of another hostage, Norman Kember.

This incident should be reported to the Press Complaints Commission as it contains demonstrable falsehoods and consists of an attempt to stoke hostility to Muslims. Bear in mind that this newspaper has a long history of printing stories of a prejudiced nature against minorities; one might remember the repeated attacks on immigrants (particularly east European Gypsies) they printed in 2004. The paper presently concerns itself with every new suspicion about the death of the long-forgotten Lady Diana. However impaired the paper’s credibility, this is still a front-page attack on our community in a national newspaper and complaints need to be registered with the PCC.

Details of how to make a complaint can be found here at the PCC website. The PCC recommend that a letter be sent to the editor, and that the PCC should be notified if he does not reply within a week. Therefore, readers are advised to contact the paper’s editor at expressletters@express.co.uk. They should point out the facts mentioned above: that the organisations mentioned have, and always have had, no ability to control extremist elements in the community because they have no policing powers and no control over mosques, in terms of permitted activities, hiring and firing, or anything else; and that the two organisations mentioned did condemn the 7th July terrorist incidents on the day they took place.

The Sunday Express can also be contacted by fax at 0871 434 7062. However, this is a premium rate 0871 number - making the Express and Star the only papers in the UK which scam people in this way when they want to contact them! If anyone can find their proper 020 number, that would be very useful as nobody wants to pay through the nose to complain to a paper when some of that money might reach the newspaper! So, an email campaign might be a better idea. If no apology is forthcoming in next Sunday’s issue, the PCC is the next step.