Source: Michael Rosen Blogspot

Author, poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen spoke at the Stand Up to Racism and Fascism March in London on 16 March 2019, one day after a far-right white supremacist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 worshippers at Friday prayers, and wounding at least 50 more. This is his speech.

Today’s demonstration was planned months ago long before the horror and terror of Christchurch, but it is that horror and terror we come together today to try to anticipate and to prevent.
It is because we fear it and dread it that we fight against it.

But what is it?

I see the newspapers are busy trying to compare what happened in Christchurch with what they call other acts of terrorism.
No need for that, newspaper people.
It is what the perpetrators say it is: white supremacism.
It’s been around for a long, long time.

It’s been used – sometimes by you, yourselves, newspaper people –
to mock, deride and condemn minorities.
It’s been used – sometimes by you, newspaper people, to justify invading and bombing other people’s countries.
It’s been used by people in power to justify slavery, segregation, discrimination, persecution and genocide.

This tells me that it’s dangerous to trust those in power to fight it.

Too often, the people in power have been the perpetrators themselves.
Too often, it’s people in power who’ve won their power and kept their power by scapegoating and persecuting minorities.

Too often, newspaper people, you’ve helped the people in power do that scapegoating and persecuting.

It’s people in power who sent vans round saying to migrants: ‘Go home, or face arrest’.
It’s people in power who created what they called a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.
It’s people in power who created the Windrush scandal.
It’s people in power who refused to treat Shamima Begum and her baby as British citizens.

And it was people in power in 1943 who ordered 4 policemen to knock on the door of my father’s uncle’s room at 2.30 in the morning in a little village in western France.

He had fought for France in the First World War.
He was a French citizen.
He had committed no crime,
He wasn’t ever put on trial.

In a well-organised, orderly way,
according to the laws of the day,
he was deported to Auschwitz
and never came back.

This is the kind of thing that people in power sometimes do.

This is why I wrote a warning that I’ll read in a moment.

It’s dedicated to my parents, Connie Isakofsky and Harold Rosen – who, in the 1930s, fought Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists on the streets of east London, right where they lived and went to school.

The Tory government of the day gave permission to that British Union of Fascists to parade through those streets. It was only the collective action of 100s of thousands of people that stopped them.

My parents showed me that we ourselves have to organise, and to turn up, to stop the rise of racism and fascism,
and they taught me that we must never forget that fascism often comes disguised.
It often appears making promises.

The poem is called:
I sometimes fear…

“I sometimes fear…
…that people might think
that fascism only ever arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

No. Not always so.
Fascism can arrive as your friend.

It can arrive saying that it will…

restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
clear out the venal and the corrupt

remind you of how great you once were,

remove anything you feel is unlike you…

It doesn’t walk in saying,

“Our programme means:
militias,
mass imprisonments,
transportations,
war,
persecution
and mass murder.”

They don’t say that. “

Adrian Mitchell sang, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems, urging us to love life and fight against oppression.

Michael Rosen wrote these words on hearing that Adrian Mitchell had died.

Adrian was a socialist and a pacifist who believed, like William Blake, that everything human was “holy”. That’s to say he celebrated a love of life with the same fervour that he attacked those who crushed life.

He did this through his poetry, his plays, his song lyrics and his own performances. Through this huge body of work, he was able to raise the spirits of his audiences, in turn exciting, inspiring, saddening and enthusing them.

His output ranged across poems and plays for the youngest children, anthologies he edited, to political satires, adaptations and translations of classic literature, to blues and jazz lyrics.

As a teenager, I watched him performing his poem To whom it may concern from the plinth at Trafalgar Square in London. I was used to reading poetry to myself in my bedroom, or at best, hearing it on the radio. But here was a poetry that responded to political events of the moment and talked to a movement of hundreds and thousands.

Many years later, as Adrian adapted the last lines of the poem: “Tell me lies about Vietnam …” to include Iraq and Afghanistan, he explained to his audience at Marxism 2006 that the poem had started out as an expression of what he called “compassion fatigue”. He couldn’t bear to hear of yet more wars.

Alongside such explicitly political work – and his collection For Beauty Douglas is one of the truly great volumes of political poetry written in English – he revelled in language itself.

He would point out how society crushes the inventiveness and play in children, and he created poetry for children that is full of wordplay, mystery, absurdity and music.

Very recently, I received through the post a sample of a forthcoming book for children based on the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To attempt it was so typical of him: he takes this set of earthy, erotic, subtle narratives and observations of change and has created a staggering cornucopia of poetry available for all.

I hate it that Adrian has died. There are more than 50 years of revolutionary literature that he has given us. He has sung, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems in every kind of place imaginable, urging us to love our lives, love our minds and bodies and to fight against tyranny, oppression and exploitation.

When he heard the news that Victor Jara, the Chilean poet, singer-songwriter had been tortured and killed by Pinochet’s thugs, he wrote a beautiful and wonderful poem that was both a celebration and lamentation.

To think of the poem as I write this is to think of Adrian, a brother and father to hundreds of us. Goodbye dear friend and dear teacher. Many of us loved you.

If Corbyn’s coat is wrong,
the others’ coats must be right.
The dead cannot see coats.
Day cannot see night.

Hurrah for the warriors of the press!
We know what rocks their boat:
at the sight of a million dead,
they quibble over Corbyn’s coat.

Let us praise famous coats,
worn to mourn the dead of war;
worn by those who lead us
as their bombs slay even more.

It’s not his coat they hate.
That’s not really their cause
What gets up all their noses?
He opposes all their wars.

Let us imagine the day –
or it could perhaps be night.
The politicians start a war
and no one turns up to fight.

_______________
MATHS:
1 wrong Corbyn coat = bad man;
Therefore 1 good coat = good man.
Trump wears a good coat.
Therefore
Trump = good man.

Source: Michael Rosen’s Blog

The Nation

Read by Michael Rosen. Video by Joe Rosen. Michael Rosen for Adults video channel

Poet, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen on how the perpetrators of bad times blame its victims to control all of us.

Source Michael Rosen Blog

Pause a moment
politician, journalist.
Think of the times you have
hinted or suggested or stated
that the problem yes the problem
is foreigners, migrants, immigrants,
refugees.
Think of the times you have hinted
or suggested or stated
that hard times were caused by the people you call foreigners, migrants, immigrants, refugees,
as if hard times were not caused by
bankers gambling with trillions,
not caused by governments
deliberately holding down pay
and sacking people or cutting
social services public services
and the health service.
Think of those times that you thought you could shore up your position, garner more support,
get more power by saying these things,
using the excuse you are ‘listening to
peoples concerns’
the very concerns you stirred with your headlines and speeches which blamed foreigners for people’s hard times, rather than your own part in the shenanigans that let the bankers run off with billions, or the government say that the people had to pay for that with their wages, and how chasing tax avoiders is too, too difficult.
And just watch what you unleash.
See what voices rise to the surface after your hints and suggestions:
people emboldened by what you said,
People emboldened to put forward plans to dismiss, fire, exile, intern, detain, deport .
And in so doing win and use powers to control, contain, restrict, deprive, intern, detain everyone.
That’s how it works: blame ‘the other’ to control all.
Blame the other to control all.

The consequences of inequality are “as deep now as they were in Victorian times”, says children’s author and poet.

Source: The Guardian

The children’s author and poet’s new version of A Christmas Carol, Bah! Humbug!, illustrated by Tony Ross, sees schoolboy Harry Gruber take the role of Scrooge in his school play, while his miserable, work-obsessed father snipes from the sidelines.

According to Rosen, most retellings of A Christmas Carol “dispense with why Dickens wrote it in the first place”. Dickens was moved to tell the story after his visit in 1843 to a central London school for slum children, and by the Children’s Employment Commission’s damning report into child labour. He originally planned to write a pamphlet, but turned to fiction instead, publishing A Christmas Carol later that year to what his biographer Claire Tomalin has called “rapturous approval”

“Dickens wrote it because he was appalled when he saw children and the way they were treated,” said Rosen.

Scrooge, asked to make “some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time”, responds: “Are there no prisons? … And the Union workhouses? … Are they still in operation?” If many “would rather die” than go there, Scrooge continues, then “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”.

Contemporary politicians who talk about “shirkers and workers”, Rosen continued, are buying into the same mindset. “The dominant view of the time is really not that different from the one expressed by Iain Duncan Smith when he brought in universal credit, which is that poor people are poor because it’s poor people’s fault.”

Dickens’s conclusion, that we should “be nice to each other and enjoy Christmas”, isn’t really a practical solution, Rosen added, but it’s a novelistic way of “satisfying us when we look at it. Taking Scrooge through his life in a way is a great way of saying, ‘Look at how you got to where you are’, so he actually forces you to think about society instead of blaming poor people for poverty. It’s a stunning book, really.”

In Rosen’s version, Harry’s father Ray “reflects an aspect of the cruelty of Scrooge – if only you could just get rid of these people. It’s a very nasty thought he has, and I wanted it to echo the Malthusian idea Scrooge has, that somebody who is a nice, decent, middle-class bloke could have these almost exterminatory ideas about poor people. I wanted the echo to go from the 19th century to the 21st in Ray Gruber’s mind.”

Readers in Dickens’s time were deeply affected by his novels, Rosen added, “by seeing how, for children in particular, poverty was being dealt with totally inadequately by Victorian society”.

Things are not really much better today, said Rosen, who is an outspoken critic of the government. “[The Victorians] had a thriving economy and desperate, widespread poverty. I see that in a sense as happening now – you see people on the telly every night telling you the economy is good while we have food banks.”

The consequences of inequality are “as deep now as they were in Victorian times”, said Rosen. “The problems people have, whether it’s with diet or access to education, access to certain kinds of knowledge, are desperate, absolutely desperate. We keep underestimating it and tidying it away. I walk past our local church and there’s a queue for the food bank. What is that? That’s in what people say is a relatively prosperous area. The fact that the church is supplying food for people to survive is extraordinary. If you think of the accumulated wealth since 1780, the beginning of the industrial revolution – where has it all gone? Why hasn’t it provided for everybody to live with a decent per capita income and jobs? They talk about it like a success but to me it looks like abject failure.”

Rosen’s editor at Scholastic UK, Linas Alsenas, said that retelling a book as “universally beloved” as A Christmas Carol “was always going to be a risky proposition. If you’re going to do it, you have to do it right.” But he added that Rosen and Ross’s new version “really nails the big question that Dickens posed: Does the drive to make money have to come at the expense of family life? It’s a problem each of us wrestles with, no less today than in the Victorian era.” And, he continued, “it’s funny”.

• Bah! Humbug! By Michael Rosen, illustrated by Tony Ross, is published by Scholastic

.

Some people do not know that the main reasons for their standard of living to go down are nothing to do with immigration.

The media keep saying:

“People are expressing concerns about immigration
People are expressing concerns about immigration
People are expressing concerns about immigration”

If you are registered as non-dom you can run a business
in the UK but pay no tax. This costs us billions.

“People are expressing concerns about immigration.”

If the government cuts public services, they increase
pressure on public services.

“People are expressing concerns about immigration.”

Since 1980, wealth has shifted from labour to capital.
In other words those that ‘have’, have more; those that
have the least, have less. Those that have the least
have given wealth to those that have more.

“People are expressing concerns about immigration”

The government regularly announces that it freezes
the wages of public service workers. This means that
people can afford less. Their living standards decline.

“People are expressing concerns about immigration”

The government has repeatedly brought in policies
which have helped to increase the price of houses.
The proportion of people’s income required to rent or buy
has steadily risen. Flats and houses cost more to live in.
There is less space per pound of people’s income.

“People are expressing concerns about immigration.”

Some people do not know that the main reasons for their
standard of living to go down are nothing to do with immigration.
Instead, they keep hearing:

“People are expressing concerns about immigration.”

You know what happens next?

some people express some concern about immigration.
After all, people can only think what they think
based on available information.
The media supply the available information.
They keep saying:

‘People are expressing concerns about immigration.”

The government laughs quietly to itself:
“People do not blame us for their living standards going down,
they blame immigration.”

If Clooney was leading the Labour Party, the media would think up a hundred reasons why he was wrong for the job.

Source: Michael Rosen

Even this limited defence (it’s hardly an attack) on austerity and what the ruling order wants (ie low wages, cuts in public services, privatisation of everything) has inflamed and enraged the ruling order and all those who speak for it.

It therefore became immediately essential for them to vilify and caricature Corbyn across the whole of the media – along these lines:

1. Corbyn is a tatty old hippy whose jumpers need darning.
2. Corbyn doesn’t love Britain. That’s why he doesn’t sing the national anthem.
3. Corbyn is a sinister terrorist.
4. Corbyn is incompetent.
5. Corbyn is middle class.
6. Corbyn lives in Islington
7. Corbyn is extremely wealthy.
8. Corbyn is wrong.

(There are many variations of these and many others.)

The drift is the same: on no account can the electorate be allowed think that the ruling order can be opposed or defied through the ballot box.

I hear some people who are essentially pro-Corbyn imagining some other person in Corbyn’s position and somehow getting more support from the press – a Tony Benn figure, perhaps? People who think that should look back at the press coverage Tony got at the time of his leadership challenge. Here was a youngish, good-looking chap with impeccable background in government with a long pedigree of politicians in his family. A fluent, witty, speaker with lots of anecdotes and concrete ways of describing what’s wrong etc etc. He was vilified variously as being too posh to be a socialist (yawn, yes, always that one), cynical, a secret Communist, surrounded with dangerous revolutionaries and marxists and ‘loony lefts’ and so on.

Ed Miliband had hardly a left policy in his baggage. He mildly proposed a ‘growth’ alternative to austerity. Look back at what they did to him: the man who looks odd – so he’s not electable. What?! Seriously?! Yes. In fact, he was the man who couldn’t even defend the fact that Labour was not responsible for the problems that global finance got itself into.

Another ‘left’ voice I see expressed on my timeline yearns for a great leader. I’m going to suggest that the more we yearn for a great leader, the less well we do in opposing low pay, worse conditions and cuts in services. I’ll caricature it as a throwback to longing for a Jesus-Lenin figure to save us. It’s tough but there really is no alternative to campaigns, and struggles on the ground. Whatever strengths and weaknesses Corbyn and the Labour leadership have, they can’t do it on their own, they won’t do it on their own. If a person broadly supports the Corbyn policies, there really is no point in moaning about the Corbyn leadership – particularly if you’re not involved in some kind of activism, no matter how limited, how small, how local. It’s armchair sniping and vilification.

This morning I’ve read reams of insults and criticism of Corbyn (from supporters of the Labour party) without them posing immediate, practical, viable alternatives. What’s the point? He’s said he’s not standing down. If such people broadly support the Corbyn opposition (mild) to austerity and, let’s say, the Trump drift to war, why not ‘accentuate the positive’ – do all you can to support these policies, do something, no matter how tiny, how limited to campaign on pay, conditions and cuts, which will draw in people to fight the Tories anyway. And avoid joining in the volley of abuse being directed towards him and the Labour leadership mostly coming from people who don’t want that kind of government no matter who was leading it.

I call it the George Clooney test. Would you support Labour if Clooney was leading it? No? Then your criticism of Corbyn is just disguised left-hating, isn’t it? Let’s discuss politics instead of personalities. If Clooney was leading the Labour Party, the media would think up a hundred reasons why he was wrong for the job – too handsome, not married for decades, gave up his job in medicine, etc…

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