Sarko and SOCPA

Sounds like an appalling late night Channel 4 comedy double act, doesn’t it? No, I was looking for news of two demos I’d been thinking of attending on the day that history will remember for Musharraf’s new coup (buried in revision, I ended up missing both), and this was on the front page of Google News (which, I should point out, always thinks I’m in France because that’s where my laptop was bought).

It seems that Chadian and other African expats in England were preparing to march on the French embassy in London, to express their outrage at the kidnapping of 103 infants by the French humanitarian agency L’Arche de Zoe, or rather, by a few of its staff who seem to consider the word “African” to be synonymous with “orphan”. The day before the march, they got a phone call from the authorities telling them to keep away from the embassy.

I’ve not found this reported anywhere except that obscure French Christian Journal - maybe it didn’t happen, maybe very few editors considered it particularly interesting, if anyone does find it elsewhere let me know - but it would be a remarkable and worrying turn in Anglo-French relations if one state is now cancelling protests in the other.

The organiser of the Chadian march expressed his faith in Britain’s traditions of civil liberties, and we could also point to the French tradition of actually using their civil liberties. However, both Britain and France are currently governed by people with very little taste for either, especially when it comes to people with a darker (or generally more foreign) shade of skin.

Can I assume that by now we’re all aware of Blair’s laws against speaking out of turn, that we heard Brown’s highly suspect “British Jobs For British Workers”, that the eternal debate about whether we should lock up suspicious-looking Muslims without trial for three months or just one is drowned out only by the bullets in the back of Jean-Charles de Menezes head? Then let’s move on to Sarkozy…

… who’s even worse. As an immigrant with mainly immigrant friends, I remember spending my time in France conversing in hushed tones about what the petit fascho was going to do to us. He has come up with some ridiculous laws (DNA tests, anyone?), but the sheer number of people he kicks out of the country is simply staggering. In the run up to his presidential campaign he was keen to avoid looking weak, and actually intensified his programme of rounding up foreigners and second-generation racaille, provoking reactions like this and this.

In fact, as President and during his long spell as Interior Minister, Sarkozy mastered the reality and language of the War State just as well as Bush and Blair; far better, in fact, as Sarkozy’s war is not happening far away (although his foreign minister is desperate to be invited to the party in Iran) but in banlieux right across France. The riots of 2005 were well reported in the international press, but the context was not. Who knew that the deaths of two teenagers running from the police were not isolated incidents at all, but the inevitable corollary of systematic, racist police brutality?

Well, Sarkozy knew. He’d been waiting for a long time for a chance to suggest “washing away the scum with a powerhose”. He didn’t invent the banlieux, the zones of exclusion, unemployment and resentment that orbit every French town worth its salt, nor did he have the idea of exploiting people’s fear of them to gain political power; when Sarkozy won the 2007 elections the leader of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, lamented that his “colours” had been stolen. But Sarkozy’s genius lay in declaring war on them. His election was all but khaki - or rather, all but blackshirt.

Now where might he have got that idea? We might look across the Channel to our own Tony Blair, who nauseatingly congratulated Sarko on his election, du fond de son coeur; Sarkozy is returning the favour by lobbying for Blair’s nomination as President of Europe. We can also look right accross the Atlantic. Sarko rarely misses a chance to praise the U. S. of A., and it has presumably been his inspiration in waging a war on the welfare state wrapped up with the Islamophobia associated with The War Against Terror. It would certainly explain how he turned out so very wrong; from France, Americans look like this…

(ok, it’s horrible franglais, but I bet you still love it)

But then, that doesn’t work. As discussed above, America’s (by which I mean, of course, the Coalition’s) wars are far off affairs and, besides, they’ve been a catastrophe for all concerned. No, we get a much better clue when we look at the comparisions between French banlieux and South African apartheid. The comparisons are apt in many ways, but they hit a wall when we realise that the most significant form of discrimination towards the inhabitants of Clichy-des-Bois and Neuilly-sur-Seine is the one that excludes them almost totally from the jobs market; South African apartheid, by contrast, was a brutal method of keeping the “racially inferior” workers in their place.

That remind you of anything? There’s another place that’s regularly compared with apartheid South Africa - indeed, Desmond Tutu considers it to be worse - and it’s a place close to Sarkozy’s heart. In occupied Palestine too, vast sections of the population are slowly, painfully excluded from their own country. That the fate of the Palestinians is so much worse than that of the banlieusards might be because the former are begrudged their very existence - but the existence of the latter is exceedingly useful. In either case, the vilification and victimisation of unwanted outsiders is making the “white” mainstream easier to control too. That’s how fascism works.

What’s The Hurry…

… in Surrey!

Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the blog or anything.  Indeed, there is much I’d like to discuss.  However, I’m cut off from the internet (and, it seems, by extension the world) at the moment, as a result of moving house for the fourth time this (academic) year.

Yes, my tour of Surrey continues; from a damp and overpriced bachelor pad in Surbiton via a crowded and disturbingly seedy arrangement in Woking, I’ve gone to a palatial spare room in leafy Knaphill.  I’m thus finally starting to see this county not just in terms of things costing too much, people driving too fast, and everyone generally being too Tory, but also as a place with trees and fields and that.  I still can’t wait to get back up North and back to studying in September (insh’Allah; I still haven’t been accepted onto the course yet).

I’m taking this opportunity to turn over a new leaf at both work and the gym.  It’s all very well holding on for September; when you resent every minute of what you do in the meantime, September is a very long way off.  From now on, I’m at least going to make the best of my situation.  I’m also training up for a 3km swim across Lake Windermere this summer.

Deprived of the internet, I’ve had to go back to the mainstream media for my news.  BBC News lost its last sliver of credibility for me with this recent piece of shameless propaganda (I was going to lay into it here, but couldn’t be bothered; luckily, Media Lens have now done the job for me); Channel 4 News went one worse with their coverage of the French elections.  Apparently, Sarkozy’s election was about “France, which believes itself the best of all possible worlds, deciding to be even better” [I'm paraphrasing, but pretty closely].

Never mind that he’s a bigot and a bully, whose legacy as Interior Minister consists basically of making the poor and mainly-immigrant banlieux ghettoes go from bad to worse than anyone had imagined possible (the police’s role, as Sarkozy sees it, is not to patrol a community maintaining order - this is a waste of money - but to keep at arm’s length until, at the slightest sign of trouble, swooping in to offer sound beatings to all concerned), whose presidential manifesto is centred around dismantling the welfare state and workers’ rights, whose policies and politik - described as “waging war on the poor” (and, in particular, those poor people with a tan and an accent - have provoked the worst riots in French history (and whose election has provoked more), never mind all that - we should celebrate the election of someone determined to put an end to France’s fine recent tradition of standing up to the axis of Americanism in order to vy for Blair’s soon-to-be-vacated warm spot on Bush’s lap.  Nauseating, it was!

And that’s without getting onto the scandal of the Scottish elections, the Mayday marches of the “illegal” untermenschen in London and LA, General Kim’s unfunny Bush joke, and all the rest of what’s been going on in my absence.

I hope to be properly back online soon.

Belleville Heroes: Vive la Sousveillance!

Some cracking video clips for you to watch and repost,courtesy of Belleville Blogue:

For those of you who can’t be bothered, here’s the gist of what happened outside East Paris’ Rafal Primary School according to local English blogger Petite Anglaise :

Police arrested an elderly Chinese man on Tuesday evening. On his way to collect his grandchildren from another school in the neighbourhood, he was handcuffed and bundled violently into a car when a spot ID check revealed he didn’t have residence papers. …

Within minutes an indignant crowd had gathered, surrounding the police car to prevent it from leaving. Some protesters lay down across the zebra crossing. Other tapped on the roof. All chanted “lâchez-le! [let him go!]” Police reinforcements were duly brought in, threats were made to unleash police dogs on the crowd, and finally tear gas was used to disperse the protesters and allow the police vehicles to leave.

The disturbing institutionalised racism and importance ofID papers shown in this video have a long and deep history in France, but we shouldn’t get too smug. We, after all, have prisons for asylum seekers.

It’s reassuring to see some resistance, for once, to the racist police state that most of the West seems to be sleepwalking into. The police should have known they were crossing a line; school is revered in French society as the “Temple de la République”, and much of the wider polemic has been more about the fact that it happened in front of the school gates than the fact that it happened at all. Despite this tradition, and police guidelines, the school gates have increasingly been police targets, where foreign-lookin’ parents of foreign-lookin’ children are like fish in a barrel.

Arrests like these have escalated dramatically over the past weeks, as Interior Minister and likely (until today, I’d have said almost certainly; now I have a glimmer of hope) almost future president Nicolas “Petit Fachô” Sarkozy frets that his immigrant-expulsion rates may be lower this quarter than last quarter, damaging his popularity in the run up to the presidential elections. As all the other presidential candidates fall over each other to condemn the incident, he has shrugged it off as “really nothing worth getting polemic about”.

But this incident has been all the more remarkable as it showcases another form of resistance. If surveillance is watching from above, watching from below is sousveillance; just as new technologies give governments new ways to spy on and control us, so too do they empower citizens to watch that government when it doesn’t necessarily want to be watched. If only French youths with cameraphones were wandering through the streets of Gaza, Ecuador or Tehran the Official Truth might be put squarely in its place.

On the power of sousveillance, Sarko is two steps ahead of the game. Just as Britain’s New Labour quietly used the protection of women from stalkers as a pretext for criminalising peaceful protest, so has France’s ruling coalition (UMP) seized the opportunity provided by le happy slapping. 16 years to the day after LAPD officers were filmed kicking and beating Rodney King to death, recording and broadcasting acts of violence became illegal in France. Technically, the people whose video clips are now bouncing around the internet could face 5 years in the old StaJa.

They were perhaps unaware of the risks they were taking, as this law has enjoyed very little coverage in the mainstream media, but these cameraphoners were doing a great public service. Without the sensation they caused in the French blogsphere (and will perhaps go on to cause in the wider blogsphere), it is hard to see the mainstream media giving this story any real attention. Protests always go underreported, for obvious reasons.

For the record, the Chinese gentleman in question was released the day after his arrest, as was the headmistress taken in for swearing at policemen and reopening the school to treat the injured.

Royal Bank of Europe

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate in the upcoming French presidential elections, is constantly under fire from her political opponents and, even more so, her political allies, not for her policies but for her lack thereof.  Her explanation that she wanted to listen to what the people wanted rather than dictate to them decisions made in dark rooms has been widely ridiculed, characterised as her excuse for her lack of experience.  Listening to the electorate is such a big departure from the French (and indeed, British) politics of the last few decades that it cannot but come as a shock to the system.

She has, finally, released a 100 point manifesto this week.  I’m in the dark as to 99 of those points, but today’s FT gave such a thrashing to one that, to me, is an idea as good as it is controversial.  Again, I don’t have much time for a-blogging tonight but I feel obliged to come to Ms. Royal’s defense.

The introduction of the Euro was such a dramatic and progressive political achievement that its economic effects rarely come into any debate on the matter.  If anything, it’s assumed that the Eurozone countries are stronger together than apart and left at that.  Well, there certainly is (would have been) a strong case for strengthening the European currencies by interdependency, but that’s not what the Euro is about.

If instead of keeping reserves in something like oil or gold or U.S. dollars, the countries of Europe kept reserves in each other’s currencies, then they would have been mutually strengthened.  Such schemes are at the heart of economic stability pacts, from the International Clearing House dreamed of by Keynes to the Chang Mai Initiative slowly gathering pace in East Asia.  But the Euro doesn’t work like this at all.

I don’t want to get into a debate for or against the Euro.  It’s certainly too late to go back, and there’s a strong case for saying that what it has achieved in bringing the Eurozone countries closer together and creating a rival “world currency” to the U.S. dollar more than offsets its negative macroeconomic effects.  That doesn’t mean that those effects should be ignored, though.

The Euro changed one thing central to the French economy.   Interest rates could no longer be set by the French national bank, but by the European Central Bank in Munich.  Now, interest rates are a central bank’s way of controlling the amount of money flowing around a country.  Too much money, and we get high inflation, whose catastrophic consequences hardly need detailing.  Too little money, and we get high unemployment, which isn’t exactly better.  Keeping the balance between the two is a tricky business, but it’s doable when the bank keeps a close eye on the state of the nation.

Keeping a close eye on the state of France is one thing.  Keeping an eye on the state of Europe is another.  Does France, a big country suffering a recession, really need the same interest rate as Finland, a small country enjoying a period of high growth?  Of course not.  The ECB cannot ensure France, or Finland, gets the interest rate it needs - it simply goes for the best Eurozone-wide compromise it can find.

Still, how diverse can the Eurozone be?  Many of its constituent countries - especially the larger ones - are suffering from very high unemployment, and a Europe-wide effort to tackle this would be more than welcome.  But no.  A national bank, under the guidance of the government, must try to find the best balance between inflation and unemployment, and democratic pressure usually keeps this from going too badly wrong.  The ECB, though, is like so many European institutions in that it is above democratic pressure and it has an inflexible mandate dictated by the business community.

The ECB is devoted not to keeping the balance, but to controlling inflation.   Now, high inflation is terrible, and even moderate inflation is bad (not least in that it usually leads to high inflation), but once you’ve got low inflation there’s little point in obsessively pushing it even lower - especially when this comes at a cost to the overall health of the economy.  It’s like the difference between sensibly watching what you eat, and going anorexic.  But ridiculously skinny inflation is good for the big businesses that dominate the European institutions, so economic anorexia is what we get.

Ségolène Royal has promised to try and change the ECB’s mandate, so it takes unemployment and general welfare into account as well as inflation.  And they don’t like that one bit.

Retrouver la France

Sorry if I haven’t posted all week. I’ve just spent five days in Strasbourg - or rather, three days in Strasbourg and two days in the train - and I’m a bit knackered. In that time (especially the train time) I’ve done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and have a lot I’d like to share, but most of that will have to wait for a night i’ve not spent cleaning a fridge and oven and disinfecting a poorly computer.
If you can’t contain your disappointment at the idea of a shorter-than-average post after such a long wait, here’s a funny video:
So, anyway, it’s been a good long weekend catching up with old friends (by the way, everyone says hi to everyone else) and meeting lovely new cheeses (beaufort and epoisses). The place doesn’t seem to have changed much since I finished my degree there in June, and there’s something very poignant about going back to a place that you used to call home.
I often look back to my days in France as something of a long-distant Golden Age, but this weekend made me really thing about exactly what had changed. There’s not much. It’s true that with short hair and no beard I’m able to scare everyone who was used to seeing Shaggy Dave, but I don’t feel I’ve changed more deeply than that. The stresses I complain about here aren’t exactly new, either; I worked longer hours then, and had more money troubles. I got out and about a lot more, but I got out of town a lot less. I miss my friends, it’s true, but on this side of the Channel I spend a lot more time with Radhika and even get to see my family fairly regularly. So what’s missing?
It hit me on Saturday afternoon. We were playing Risk, just as we often used to play strategy games long into the night back in the day, and I was doing pretty badly. More so than usual. I put this down to having started in a bad place and being out of practise, but that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that, right at the beginning of the game, I saw that I had few opportunities in the short term, and so pretty much gave up any pretense of hope of winning.
Every move I made for the first few hours (after six hours we figured it would never end, tidied up and went out for some fresh air) was reactive, what I judged to be the least-worse course of action for a desperate man. It was too late for strategy, I just had to take what I had and gamble. What rubbish.
That’s pretty much how I’ve been living life lately as well. I grabbed my job out of panic, unsure of when I’d get another chance. My flat, too. I’ve ended up paying way too much for my Christmas holidays because I refused to book them in advance, and I find myself so frustrated, so trapped by the uncertainty surrounding Radhika’s visa that I’ve literally incapable of making even the sketchiest of plans beyond the beginning of next year. No wonder I’m going nowhere.
In the end, I said to myself that a game’s not lost until it’s won, and started looking for a way forward. And I found one, and had great fun putting it into action. That’s quite easy to do in Risk, because you know exactly what you’re trying to do (in this case, conquer the world) and form a strategy around that. In life, that’s trickier.
At university, I knew what I was after. I was after a degree - not so much for the qualification, but to win a bet with myself that I could hack it in a foreign country. There were, to be sure, distractions, but all the work I had to do was for that goal, that purpose. Now? When I left uni, I didn’t have the skills or the experience to do any of the jobs I really wanted to do. I took the job I took with the intention of staying for a few years, getting some money, some experience, and then going on to something more interesting. But the money I manage to save is laughable next to the money that slips through my fingers every month in rent, tax and bills, and what experience I do gain is so specific to Company X that it will be hard to make use of anywhere else.
The job’s ok, really. But it’s not interesting enough to do for it’s own sake. If I don’t squeeze another millisecond out of this program’s performance… who really cares? No, it’s a fine job as long as you’re doing it for something. But as long as I keep doing it just as the-least-worse-option-now-that-it’s-too-late-for-anything-else, there’s no way. And as for that something, some money and some experience isn’t enough, because they’ll always be more money to be made, more skills to get.
I need a plan. Or rather, I need a dream, a purpose. I once had a dream, literally, of living in France, among the French. I enrolled in French class. Now I’ve been there, done that. Once you know where you want to be, you can look at getting there. That’s what I’m missing now, and that’s what I need to find - or make up - as soon as possible. There are plenty of things I dreamed of, and gave up on when I got a job, and there are plenty more things no-one has ever yet dreamed.
And now it’s far later than I meant for it to get, and I’m tired. Now to sleep, perchance to dream.

Travels and Tribulations

You could question the logic of getting your skin, mind and muscles incredibly nice and relaxed in the spa the day before putting them through a stressful ordeal of trains and boxes. Even more so just before your first day of work. Still, such is life.

The spa is brilliant. I succeeded in getting my shy Radhika into the sauna, albeit briefly, but we both really benefitted from the things that massage your back with jets of mineral water. But by God, if I felt the benefit then I’m not feeling it now.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent frantically packing and cleaning and, of course, lugging some ridiculously heavy stuff accross town against the clock (Radhika’s had to vacate her halls of residence, so some of her stuff has had to be kept at Tomas’ place). It’s amazing how much sheer mass can be crammed into a suitcase.

Anyway, by Friday morning I was already exhausted, but now it was time to take all we could carry back to London. By train. Via Paris and Lille. Of course, in both of these cities we had to change not only trains, but stations, and this was not easy.

In Paris we had twenty minutes to get from the Gare de l’Est to the Gare du Nord in about 20 minutes. The antiquated metro would have taken that long just sorting tickets and getting to the train, and the taxi I hailed wouldn’t take us because it wasn’t a long enough trip to be worth his while.

So we went on foot, fully laden, along Avenue d’Alsace with its steep flight of stairs and across a building site in front of the second station. Once there it was a long trek along the platform to our carriage, French trains (and thus stations) often being quite insanely long.

Lille was nowhere near as bad, although getting on to the Eurostar involved an encounter with one of my arch foes - immigration officials. Apart from the genuine disagreements I have with the whole business of borders and visas and drawing arbitrary lines across the world, I still harbour a lingering resentment towards them for their treatment of my Colombian ex-girlfriend.

Anyway, they were the straw that broke the camel’s back and by the time the Eurostar pulled out I just felt like a dead man. Then in London our taxi driver didn’t hear us telling hime to stop, and took us way past our destination, Arjun’s house, and we had to walk what was probably only about a quarter of a mile but felt a lot longer back up Mile End Road.

This was Friday night. I was to start a new job on Monday morning. A sensible person would have spent the weekend recuperating and preparing, but after a long history of missing out on parties back home I had promised sincerely and repeatedly to get back on Saturday for the 21st birthday of my good friend P�che. The date had in fact been changed to accomodate me, and so I had to spend Saturday and Sunday in megabuses to and from Manchester. In fact, on Sunday, not only was I hung over, but both the M6 and Kingston (where I’m now staying) train station were both unexptectedly closed.

If this sounds more like a list of grievances than a proper entry then perhaps you’ll understand a/ how I feel, b/ why I can’t be bothered writing about my first day at work right now and c/ why I’ve resolved to find a flat near the office and take a break from trains and buses.

Frogs’ Legs and Snails

The rains finally broke today. I’d set my alarm early to get all my stuff done in town before the heat set in, but I heard the rain coming down on the windowpane, opened the blinds and dozed until it stopped. Nothing better. Of course, the clouds are starting to part again now and I bet it’ll be boiling come lunchtime, but we’ve had a few nice hours.
Today I do have a lot to get done (I’m typing this waiting to see if an email arrives from Google), but it’s been a good weekend.
Sunday was mainly taken up by Saturday’s hangover, watching the extras on the Spinal Tap DVD and eating rasaam, but Saturday was a good night. We started at my place in the early evening and, as the drinks ran out, moved across to a late-night bar and then to my mate Edouard’s house where the drunken antics continued. In all it went on for nearly twelve hours, though I of course spent the last three hours asleep.
Friday was the university’s end of year party, although by now most of the students have already gone home to their own villages/countries and it wasn’t exactly heaving. Still, it was the first time I’ve been clubbing in about a year and you have to do these things from time to time - the important thing is, I didn’t have to pay to get in.
Then there was Thursday, when Tomas and Ed took me to a French restaurant (the first time I’ve actually been to one, since cheeses aside I’m not generally a huge fan of French food, and there are Middle Eastern eateries everywhere) where we had the Frenchest things on the menu.
Snails are actually very nice. I’d tried them once in Belgium, boiled and unseasoned, where they were quite abominable, but here they’re grilled in garlic and herbs. Frogs’ legs, though, I know what the deal with those is now. Normally I don’t eat meat, but I can say that the taste isn’t that special even if it is indeed a bit like chicken. The thing with frogs’ legs isn’t the taste, or the texture, I’m sure of that now.
You probably imagine something green, but I guess it’s been skinned or something because it’s very white, and the big floppy webbed feet have gone leaving just very small skeletal feet. In fact it looks for all the world like a pair of human legs in miniature, like a woman from the waist down. Only it’s edible… sheer brilliance. We also shared a Baeckehoffe (sp?), a hotpot that has spent 24 hours bubbling in Alsatian wine and, of course, some really really nice Alsatian wine.
Tomorrow night, I think I’ll have chips and curry.

Beginning of the end

After nearly three years, in three days I will have finished at the CRL. It was in many ways the best student job I could have asked for, with the most demanding parts of most weeks being 45-minute conversation classes with small groups of pretty girls.
Then again, the hours have been subject to change from week to week - and this semester in particular has seen a dramatic drop - and many of the actual minutes have involved dull administrative work. No attempt at initiative takes long to run out of momentum in the face of a lack of cordination and an inflexible and near-omnipotent central administration. So I’m happy to have worked there but equaly happy to be leaving.
I now have two and a half weeks of revision before the final exams, after which I will be footloose and free to spend hours looking for a real job. In the meantime, exams or no, I have to pay the rent, and have been doing odd-jobs for the university. This may extend to the translation of some technical documents, but so far all I’ve been doing is typing up questionnaire results.
These questionnaires have been filled in by Algerian university teachers, and concern the use of IT facilities in their universities. I like to think that no job is ever devoid of interest, so here’s what I’ve learned over sixteen hours (so far) of copying paper forms into the computer by hand.
1: Algerian universities are badly strapped for cash, and don’t have the means to invest in computer facilities, 2: many teachers bring their own computers to class and do what they can, but are held back by a lack of training and encouragement, and 3: when a questionnaire is conceived in Strasbourg for use in Algeria, the preconceptions and cultural assumptions it makes may deeply confuse many of the researchers and teachers that fill it in.
Make of that what you will. Personally, I think it’s vitally important that the internet and associated access to information be accessible to every human being on the planet, and (especially given the chronic lack of jobs in France) I’d be more than happy to go and work in Algeria or wherever to make that a reality.
Of course, fresh out of university with just a bachelor’s degree, I’m likely to have to take whatever job I am given wherever that might be, but one day I will hopefully be in a position to choose. I still haven’t given up hope on going straight on to a masters in October, but that is looking increasingly unrealistic.
It takes about a year to apply in the UK, while in Strasbourg masters students are at seperate campus miles away from anything where it’s unlikely I could juggle work and study as I do now. Besides, given the new anti-immigration laws and the town’s whole Europe obsession (Strasbourg is one of several cities that refer to themselves as the European Capital), any jobs in international development will be given to Finns, Greeks and Irishmen* before they even open my Indian girlfriend’s application letter.
So in all likelihood its all over, for now at least. In a month’s time I’ll no longer be a student, but a jobseeker. Even if I have no offers yet, I’m fairly optimistic about getting something before long (Google even showed a brief interest in hiring me, though they now seem to have forgotten), and if I don’t get a job worth staying in I can at the least practise programming and put money to one side for a year before enrolling for a masters in Bristol or Edinburgh or something.
Anyway, all that’s not for straight away. For now, I should really be stressing about the exams.
* but not to Poles, Czechs or Turks - France has yet to open its doors to workers from the EU’s ten newest members and is fiercely opposed to Turkey joining the union. It was happy as a big fish in a small club, and still doesn’t see why the rest of the world should be allowed to play.

Remember, remember

I wasn’t going to write tonight. I’ve been with Radhika all weekend, only going outside to buy bread and go to the cinema (we saw V for Vendetta - fantastic). I’m feeling quite tired, and could do with a cup of tea, a nap, and some serious revision, but the guy opposite me has been reading racist propaganda for the last hour and has really started to annoy me.
The propaganda in question comes from the MPF, one of many new up-and-coming far-right parties in France. Their slogans include “France - you like it or you leave”. Their leader, Philippe de Villiers, is becoming a familiar face in newspapers where he frequently makes political capital criticising the current immigrant-friendly government.
To put things in perspective, this is the goverment who tried last year to pass a law obliging schools to teach kids about the “positive role” of French imperialism. The goverment who, two years after the expansion of the EU, refuses to open its job markets to citizens of the new countries. The government who has passed several punitive anti-muslim laws* and smugly justified them as secularism.
I won’t even get into the riots last year, but one scandalous new law that was originally crowded out of the headlines by employment law is definately worth mentioning. France is planning to introduce a policy of “selective immigration”, whereby immigration rules are to be dramatically tightened for all but the most highly qualified engineers and doctors.
To go with this law, they want to expel all the sans-papiers, those who have neither French nationality nor the vast dossier of residence- and work-permits that a foreigner is supposed to have. Many of these people have been here for years, and have jobs and homes and lives here. They include children, raised here and knowing no other country. Tens of thousands of people are involved and the powers that be, eager to distract an angry electorate, wants them all out.
I’m having a go at France because that’s where I am, and that’s what I see most of, but you’re no better, Great Britain. I don’t want to talk about the recent elections (that’s what the BNP want, and besides, the Greens and the RESPECT coalition made similar gains) because I didn’t get my postal vote sorted in time and thus didn’t participate, but there are plenty more things to complain about.
Britain is debating its own selective immigration laws which seem likely to pass, and many long-term residents do get deported with no warning. Immigration is almost as much of a political football in England as it is in France, and why?
Some would link immigration to crime, to unemployment, or to wasted public money, but anyone who thinks that these problems can be solved by closing our doors to the world is being hopelessly naive. No, it’s all part of a broader campaign to sow paranoia and distrust wherever possible, to pit us all against our neighbours for our own protection.
I’m talking about constant surveillance, from speed cameras to TV detector vans. I’m talking about these stupid new ID cards and biometric cameras, that cost far more than the bobbies we can’t afford to have on the beat. I’m talking about those scary adverts asking us to grass up anyone who’ll sometimes give out leaflets at the Arndale for a couple of quid an hour and still call themselves unemployed. I’m talking about the inevitable coming-together of harsh copyright laws and government censorship.
Radhika and I often talk about getting out of Europe before its too late, and a lot of scenes from V for Vendetta seem eerily prophetic. But I don’t like to be so fatalistic. I don’t believe that the English (or even, for that matter, the French) are all foaming-at-the-mouth racists, fundamentally hostile to anything different. I’m proud of my roots, and I think that we are capable of great things if we all just pull together. We have such hope, such opportunities to build a better future, lets not piss it all away in a fit of paranoia.
* It is illegal to wear a headscarf in school, and it is illegal not to go to school. It is illegal to wear a headscarf on your identity card photo (unless you are a catholic nun from Brittany), and it is illegal not to have an identity card.

Coding binge

I had my English exam today. We had a 32-page text to wade through, with three writing-based questions, in an hour. The few maths and I.T. teachers who let themselves be talked into organising an English exam seem to be principally motivated by spite and a desire to feel superior.
Of course, it’s not all bad. We’ve recently discovered that three of our modules have no exams in June, only project work and modular exams in April. This means we’re under massive, massive pressure now, but will have six weeks to revise for the other five modules at a nice, leisurely pace.
This week couldn’t be further from a nice, leisurely pace, but we’re coping. This is the fourth consecutive night I’ve been in the computer rooms until kicking-out time at 10pm, and between cybercafés and other people’s flats I plan to be online most of the weekend making good progress.
But then, all these modular exams… At the beginning of the semestre we were told that they would take place on a Wednesday morning, so I made sure that I would not be at work on Wednesday mornings. Then they moved them to Tuesday evenings, when not only am I in work, I often have a class to teach.
As a working student, I am allowed to opt out of some of the modular exams, but it’s an administrative nightmare. Each module has its own head, and to get out of an exam I have to track down said head of module and get him to fill in and sign a form. If there’s one thing I hate more than filling in forms, it’s getting other people to fill in forms for me.
As a striker, on the other hand, it would have been spectacularly easy. I would just have to sign a declaration saying I had been to busy striking and protesting to revise. My pride keeps me from faking it, but one of my classmates who also has a job ended up giving up on the process and pretending to have been on strike.
That, basically, is all you need to know about France.
On the other hand, I must admit to having been to hard on the Alsatian Spring the other week. It has been quite pleasant - I’ve been walking about with no coat - and we’ve had some refreshing light rain and even some sweet thunder. Motorway embankments are becoming yellow-and-white meadows, and the university grounds are strewn with apple- (or is it cherry- ?) blossoms.