Legitimate concerns?
JVL Introduction
The list of places presumed under threat on the evening of 7th August 2024 was of Immigration Lawyers’ offices. This focus, like the background Islamophobia that also provided the framing for the riots has been fuelled by government and criticism of Starmer’s approach is also included in this piece.
The attack on lawyers is the main, but not only focus for this thoughtful blog post. Another is the use of the term “legitimate concerns” implying that those who have little, are threatened by the presence of people who have been labelled as “other” rather than the decades of deindustrialisation and more recent austerity and those who are responsible for that. Also as Mr Abney quotes here: “Unlike the rigid picture we’re presented with, the groups that are used to make sense of society are internally diverse; it’s not only that working-class people of colour and working-class immigrants are absent from the analysis of disenfranchisement; working-class people who resist racism are too. Anti-immigrant feeling is not an unstoppable train; peoples’ identities are not fixed.” Goodfellow, The Hostile Environment, p. 174.
It is also worth listening to Akala (here, for example) who is always clear that the emphasis on changing individuals, while important, is a distraction from addressing the structural racism that impacts on Black and Brown people in Britain (and elsewhere). The writer here notes ” The fact that some feel compelled to violence against some of the most marginalised and demonised in Britain should only be surprising to those who have been living under an extremely heavy rock or have recently been born.”
LL
This article was originally published by Mr Abney on Substack - Notes from Precarity on Thu 8 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
Defend our legitimate concerns
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1,000 in Walthamstow? If the images I’ve seen are only 1,000, I’m a Dutchman [in joke; that’s how my name’s pronounced!]. There were about that number in Liverpool, and W looked to be 10 times that number!
Very thoughtful and useful article. And the array of Daily Mail screaming headlines speaks for itself.
It was not only immigration lawyers who were threatened. I volunteer with Citizens Advice, and our HQ received threats as well as a number of branches. For the twisted minds of the people who make these threats, anyone working to reduce suffering in the least well off part of society is fair game, it seems.
All too often ‘listen to’ is a euphemism for pander to.
It is as if some politicians do not seem to think that it is their job to engage people in discussion and seek to win arguments. We do not accept it in other professions. Imagine how it would look if a tennis player thought that it was not his job to try to hit the ball back into his opponent’s side of the court. Or imagine how dangerous it would be if a doctor simply caved in and prescribed antibiotics to someone who he knew was suffering from a viral infection.
Sometimes. of course, politicians seek to hide behind ‘public opinion’ because they actually want those policies themselves for their own reasons.