Archive for the 'Opinion' Category

Give the BNP a stage. The public trap-door is ready.

Lech Sikorski

The BNP have been accused of committing the worst forms of quasi-intellectualism, narrow-minded racism, tactical yoking and shameful incidents of conduct – race exclusive membership – to have pervaded Britain’s shores in recent times. There appears to be a consensus amongst political commentators that the BNP is deliberatively malicious towards ethnic minorities, in their attempts to ‘cleanse’ Britain of multi-culturalist attitudes under the banners of “real British identity” and “sustainable demographics.” Whilst there is an agreement about the controversial nature of the BNP, there is a disagreement about how best to confront it’s recent popularity.

The recent decision to allow the BNP on Question Time has brought fury to those who claim that we shouldn’t give the BNP a national platform. Personally, I believe that maximum exposure of the BNP would assist in the process of dragging their muck politics out of the gutter and being held to account by the court of public opinion. Bonnie Greer, Jack Straw, Chris Huhne and as of yet unknown representative of the Conservative party have the opportunity to deftly discredit the BNP brand and should seize it as a responsibility to do so. The arguments that the BNP propose must be proved to the people, like any political party in a democratic system, to be demonstratively wrong, illogical and unworkable. An appearance of Question Time will help to speed up the de-masking process.

Should the appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time be allowed to happen? Is this a failing of current party politics? The Politics Society welcomes and encourages all views. Tell us what you think.

David Cameron (Or; How I learnt to stop worrying and love the Tories)

Opinion Piece, views expressed are those of the author and not of the Politics Society, et cetera et cetera.

by Lindon Layton Best

David Cameron is an idiot. A simpering, say anything, dough faced, preposterous waddling idiot with a feeble insincere voice and an irritating tendency to squat at the top of opinion polls, and our crowned Prime minister Elect. Urgh. My stomach’s upset at the thought of it.

The above are just unreasoning snap judgements, based upon his media profile of the past few years – but then again, as almost anyone must concede, he was engineered by the Conservative party leader to be just that; a media profile upon which people make snap judgements. So that’s fair enough. On that basis, for the moment, let’s stick with snap judgements shall we?

There is nothing to him; he’s like a hollow chocolate Easter egg with no bag of sweets inside. Cameron will say almost anything if he thinks it might get him elected. If a shock poll announced that 51% of the British Populace had converted to bestiality, I would not be surprised to see Cameron on the news, riding around London on an open-top bus with the complete ensemble of animal farm, engaged in a weird erotic tryst of ecstasy and nature defying indecency.

He is nothing.

He is no one.

It’s notoriously tricky to find out much about his past. Believe me, I’ve tried. Beyond his time spent at privileged private prep schools, then at the required Oxbridge education that is mandatory of all Conservative Leadership candidates before waddling around and stewing in the juices of the Conservative Party wilderness years whilst managing to raise himself to position of the architect an election manifesto that would have had Margaret Thatcher suggest toning down on the ‘Tough on Crime, Tough on the Criminals, Tough on the Country, Tough on Johnny Foreigner and Slash the Tax’ the man is a ghost. It’s like he took care to remove the majority of evidence of his past life, slicing off his finger tips in order to leave no prints that could link him to the past. Have you ever seen the tips of his fingers? Have you? Of course not, think about it.

The apparently self penned autobiography on Cameron’s website begins, ‘I was born in October 1966’ and then leaps straight forward to 20001, missing out the decades he spent as a guffawing, top-hatted toff in between. The infamous picture of Dave posing alongside his inbred aristocratic chums from the Bullingdon Club in an expensive, hand tailored navy blue tail suite is one of the few clues we have as to who David Cameron is. It also looks surprisingly like the sort of Photo that Poirot or Miss Marple might study after a grisly murder has been committed; one where a group of friends might have accidently killed a prostitute during a drunken, stormy night, and collaborated on the cover-up. Now, I’m not saying the Bullingdon boys kill prostitutes, I’m just saying judging by the photo, and making that all important ‘Snap Judgement’, I wouldn’t be surprised. And that’s his fault, not mine. He’s gone out of his way not to mention his blue-blooded carousing, because he knows it would make the average citizen puke themselves into a coma, and one side effect of this is that he seems shifty and suspicious.

Every time I look at Cameron, I’m reminded of video game characters: not the lovably spiky ones like Sonic or Mario, but the bland, generic, dead eyed avatars you can create for use in a tennis game. You start with a bald clone, then add features drawn from a limited pallet; eye colour, one of three noses, an optional goatee beard and so on – and invariably end up with an eerily characterless zombie straight out of the board game guess who. Simulated choice as opposed to genuine variety. It’s easy to build a Cameron look alike, just simulate the smuggest looking estate agent you can think of, or some interchangeable braying twit in a four by four driving through the streets of inner city Manchester, RARing himself into oblivion. Easy.

Naturally, I’m biased. I’ve instinctively hated the Tories since birth. If there was an election tomorrow, and the only two choices were the Nazis or the Tories, I’d vote Tory with an extremely heavy heart. In descending order of vehemence, my objections to the Tory species stem from a) everything they do, b) everything they say, c) everything they stand for, d) how they look, e) their stupid names and f) the noises I imagine they make in bed. I once overheard two posh people - almost certainly Tories - having sex in a hotel room. It was grim. The woman kept saying, “Fuck me, Gerald,” in a cut-glass, received pronunciation accent, which was funny, but Gerald himself soon wiped the grin off my face with his grunting, which wasn’t really grunting at all, but instead consisted of the words “oh” and “ah” crisply orated aloud, like Sir Laurence Olivier reading dialogue off a card at an early rehearsal. I didn’t stick around long enough to hear the climax, but I imagine the words “gosh”, “crumbs”, and “crikey” probably put in an appearance.

And here is why that’s relevant: Cameron almost certainly says “crikey” at the vital moment. Go on, picture it. Right now, in your mind’s eye. You know it’s true. If nothing else in this puerile one-sided hatchet job has convinced you, that’s reason enough not to elect him, right there.

As to his actual political record, where does one begin? Probably with where it started, a job interview that included a reference from unnamed sources within Windsor Castle itself. From there, he acted as speech writer and public relations executive for the Grey Man of politics himself, Mr John Major, the biggest minor in conservative politics. John Major went on to become a mammoth of Conservative politics, shaggy, unwanted and outdated, losing in the biggest land slide to date in 1997, after barely scraping through the 1992 election. Surely, having backed such a stallion, Cameron could only go onto greater things?

Well, he didn’t want to. Deciding that he didn’t have enough experiance of the toil of the common man, Dave decided the way forward was to become a hard hitting journalist. Who worked as a special advisor to the Conservative party. After this, his life largely revolved around revolving around politics. A mediochre voting record which stands with the most right wing of political movers and shakers leaves us with one feeling. That there’s no way in hell Clegg, the most polite man in politics, could stand to share the front page of broadsheet with him. Ignore what the flapping potatoehead mouth tells you, Cameron isn’t nice. He’s as right wing as you can get without joining the BNP. His pretenses otherwise should unnerve at the best of times.

In summary, then: he is nothing, because he tries to be everything.

Self-Censorship Gone Mad

Lech Sikora-Sikorski

Few quotations on the subject of civil liberties can be more familiar than Voltaire’s “I hate what you say but I will defend to the last your right to say it.” The decision undertaken by home secretary Jacqui Smith to prevent Geert Wilders, leader of the right wing Freedom-party in Netherlands, from entering the UK has directly violated the principle that the remark embodies, namely freedom of speech.

His documentary, from which stemmed the current furore, is a poisonous dose of brutal propaganda, designed to foment fear and hatred of Muslims. Mr Wilders compares the ‘Koran’ to Hitler’s notorious ‘Mein Kampf’ for its incendiary content, and demands that it be proscribed. With an irony so clumsy that it can be lost only on himself, he declares 2009 “a year to defend free speech”.

Continue reading ‘Self-Censorship Gone Mad’

GenSec’s Plans for 2008/2009

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and not the views of the Politics Society.

Hi all, and thanks for taking the time to read my article! My name’s Rob Pinfold and I’m (as of about three weeks ago) The General Secretary of the University of Manchester Students’ Union. I’ve been invited by the Politics Society to lay out my positions on some issues as well as some of the (many!) things I want to achieve in my year of office.
Continue reading ‘GenSec’s Plans for 2008/2009′

Guest Articles

As we head towards the end of this academic year, we are experimenting with a new feature on the Politics Society website, known as “Guest Articles”. Our aim is to give students a platform on which they can express their opinions and give others the ability to debate the views expressed in the article. As a society, we do not support any political group or alignment and will aim to give fair representation to all groups. If successful, guest articles will feature prominently on our new website (to be built over the summer) and become a regular feature (hopefully weekly) in the next academic year.

The first article to be published is written by Rob Tidy and is entitled “Why won’t our Union campaign for LGBT rights?“. Rob has proposed the “Love Without Borders” LGBT rights motion at several General Meetings and the motion has never been passed - potentially because quorum was never met or was lost when the motion was up on the agenda. Rob outlines some of his frustrations in this article.

The second article is entitled “Winning a Free Education“, written by Chris Jenkinson. Chris has been elected for the role of UMSU Academic Affairs Officer for next year and states in the article why he opposed the free education motion at last week’s General Meeting and some of his views on how we should be campaigning for a free education.

If you are interested in writing articles for the society, drop me an email at james@manchesterpolitics.co.uk.

Winning a Free Education

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and not the views of the Politics Society.

I knew that speaking in our Students’ Union general meeting against a motion entitled Fight For a Free Education would inevitably open me up to attacks that I don’t agree that higher education should be free, as it was before 1997. So before I start describing how we can win a free education, let me set one thing straight: I believe that access to higher education should be accessible to all, and the best way for this to happen is for the cost of the education to be paid by the government through general taxation, and for students to be supported with universal, rather than means-tested grants.

Where I differ from those I affectionately describe as being on the hard left is how to achieve it. The Students’ Union should have policy supporting a free education, but needs to be a sensible and inclusive one which reaches out to students. It shouldn?t be prescriptive - specifying a monthly quota of flyers or the text to appear on a plaque is counterproductive.

We need a policy which enables campaigners and activists to reach out to less politicised students and allows them to take ownership of the campaign, engaging them and ensuring that even small actions taken are steps towards victory. Continue reading ‘Winning a Free Education’

Why won’t our Union campaign for LGBT rights?

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and not the views of the Politics Society.

Wednesday 30th April saw one of the best attended UMSU General Meetings this academic year, second only to November?s spectacle of democracy. We?ve debated policies about war, finance, environmentalism and internationalism: a list that shows just how conscientious and politically active our members are, and one which leaves me speechless. Almost.

This year, the General Meeting, ?the supreme decision-making body of the Union?, has decided that it still quite likes Palestine and that it?s not too keen on global warming, which I’m sure most of us (except perhaps for next year’s supposedly right-wing Zionist Union Executive committee) would see as both laudable and worthwhile. It’s been presented, when it’s actually managed to achieve quoracy, with a further twelve undebated motions ranging in topic from the dire state of our bars to cold-blooded murder. Without being passed by the GM the union can’t take any real stance on these issues, which is a sorry state of affairs for the largest student union in Europe to get into given that we need less than 1% of our members to give up a few hours a term. It?s just not cunting (see http://www.umsu.manchester.ac.uk/pdf/MOTION_H_30.4.08.pdf).

Continue reading ‘Why won’t our Union campaign for LGBT rights?’