Indigo Jo Blogs

'A world of casual racism' exposed at BA - Home News, UK - The Independent

This was the front-page feature in the Independent yesterday: a former senior pilot with British Airways revealed that casual racism among flight crew was the norm, particularly among older cabin crew, who expected others like them to be on the 'same side' apparently without knowing them:

"There was the time when we set off for Los Angeles with a large party of Saudis on board, who had joined us at Heathrow direct from the VIP lounge," he added. "In the cruise, my captain suddenly embarked on an extraordinary rant about 'rag-heads'. He got the word out twice before I stopped him by explaining he was going to be short of a first officer for the return sector if he carried on." Mr Maughan, who lives in Dunblane, Perthshire, was on another flight when a fellow flight officer complained that there were too many Asians in Britain. "The captain turned to me and said: 'I don't suppose there are many of them up your way.' I replied: 'Well, there's my wife.' After that, they had the decency to fall silent," he said.

He said that this sort of behaviour is as common at BA now as it was in the RAF 25 years ago, and that management had not done much about it. Robert Fisk also has a dim view of the "haughty" company he thinks should be called Rendition Airlines.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ed Jones on being driven from his Salford home by vandalism, racist abuse and violence - Guardian Unlimited

This was a really shocking story which was in the Guardian yesterday. The author, who had lived in Hulme and Moss Side (notoriously rough parts of Manchester) for most his adult life and done two years in jail, thought it was a snip to get a 4-bedroom terraced house for £50,000, but soon found out why it was so cheap: his ownership "amounted to joint tenancy with a gang of local boys who had taken up part-time residence on my porch and front steps, probably dating from the 18-month period the house had been empty before I bought it", and the lads alternated between engaging him in conversation (about their delinquency) and breaking into his house. The neighbourhood was also full of sick and mentally-ill people.

Then, when he got some Slovakian lodgers, things turned very nasty very quickly, and it ended with him and his lodgers being driven out under the above threat from a racist local goon. Through it all, the police did next to nothing, having blocked easy access to the estate to stop joyriders, and put complainants in a difficult position by asking them to identify their attackers in front of them. They also hold pointless public meetings in a district where people are afraid to talk to the police, and take part in photo-shoots with Hazel Blears to crow about the "success" of action against antisocial behaviour.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I passed by the Zimbabwean embassy in the Strand, London, where there was a small group of protestors, black and white, who asked me to sign their petition, which I did. I struck up a conversation with the elderly white (non-Zimbabwean) lady who was at the front of the stall, regarding the death of the last white Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, last week. During our brief conversation, a white woman with a southern African accent - I think she was South African rather than Rhodesian/Zimbabwean - began extolling the virtues of Rhodesia under Ian Smith, in which, she said, the white people ran schools for their black servants and all sorts of other great things happened.

This is not the first time I've heard white (and even not quite white) people from that part of the world saying that Apartheid was better than Black rule. There seems to be an assumption that native people are vastly less civilised than "we" are and that they are really better off being ruled by beneficent whites. I've even heard it said that "black people can't farm", by people who've never planted more than a few garden flowers in their lives.

Will white people ever get over their colonial sense of superiority? The descent of Zimbabwe into "barbarism" is appalling and is not much under dispute, but the 20th century has many examples of white countries being offered democracy and going down the path of totalitarianism instead, with consequences every bit as appalling (the Holocaust and the man-made Ukrainian famine being the most notorious examples) as what has happened in Zimbabwe. What has happened in Zimbabwe, as to a lesser extent in South Africa, is a revolutionary and liberation movement thinking it has a divine right to rule after the revolution is finished, and the people going along with it.

In case nobody has noticed, there are other places in Africa where democracy has been established and has actually persisted since the post-colonial dictatorships fell - Senegal and Malawi are two recent examples. Democracy even in the white west, as opposed to the rule of a landowning elite, is actually a quite recent development. Given the behaviour of the South African Apartheid regime in its domination of the Black majority, and when it was challenged, I do not believe that white people have much to teach southern Africans about civilised behaviour.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)