It is the end of the 1960s at a Leeds high school, and Caryl Phillips has a peculiar status among his classmates: he is the sole black student on the rolls. As a new school term begins, his two brothers arrive, tripling at a stroke the school’s racial diversity, and at the same time ending his sense of uniqueness. “I remember feeling that my freedom was about to be reduced,” he recalls.

This was a Britain still adapting to the arrival of immigrants from the former colonies of the West Indies. Phillips’s parents had left the island of St. Kitts in 1958, bringing their young son to what they had every reason to hope would be a country promising new opportunities. The reality that he and his brothers were facing a decade later was somewhat more complicated. Nonetheless, they had to a great extent assumed their rightful place in a country accustoming itself to the idea that being British no longer meant being white.

Delivering the Morrell Address on Toleration, an annual lecture organised by York’s Politics department held this year on November 1, Phillips begins exactly as you might expect a world-renowned writer of fiction to begin: with a story.

“All three of us knew how to cope. We knew when to fight, and when to run,” he tells his audience. “I spent most of my childhood fighting and running.” These skirmishes aside, the impression he gives of his experience is that of an insider; different, certainly, but by no means peripheral. As he continues, it becomes clear that not all of his contemporaries were as fortunate.

One morning, there is a new name, “like an afterthought, tagged on the end of the register.” Ali is Pakistani, a “moon-faced” boy, shy, friendless, and outcast in a way that Phillips has difficulty imagining even in retrospect. In afternoon exercises, he is inevitably last round the track, “seen through the late afternoon gloom, his spindly legs always appearing on the point of collapsing.” His effort goes unheeded, however, by his schoolmates lined up on the finishing line, who racistly chant – with that unrivalled schoolchild capacity for cruelty: “Pack it in, Ali!”

The story culminates with the young Phillips finding himself one afternoon on the upper deck of the bus home, his schoolmates taunting Ali as usual. This time though they go that step further, seizing the unfortunate boy’s bag and tossing its contents from the windows, “their stupid faces flushed with success.”

In an act of outsider solidarity, Phillips takes Ali to the school secretary, and explains to her what has happened. Her reply is as blunt as it is dismissive. “Poor Ali”, Phillips reflects bleakly, “could neither run nor fight.”

It is abundantly clear that his telling of this story carries with it no small measure of guilt; partially at his failure at the time to do more to help, but also at the recognition of a yawning cultural divide between the two boys’ experiences.

“There was a clear cultural difference,” Phillips explains. As someone well-adapted to British society, he was able to compete on equal terms with his peers. Ali, who lacked “the good manners not to flaunt a foreign language,” could have no such hopes.
Caryl Phillips comes to York with a reputation that has taken him far beyond his nearby hometown. He now lives in the United States, and is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, several collections of non-fiction, and a number of widely-performed plays. He has been described by the New York Times as “one of the literary giants of our time.”

His work, which also includes frequent articles in The Guardian and other publications, is characterised by a thoughtful, perceptive treatment of his experiences of migration and questions of identity. He was therefore a natural choice to deliver a lecture on toleration. It might seem odd, however, that a well-travelled, urbane writer who has already covered such themes extensively in his work would return, as a first point of reference, to an event that happened over three decades ago in the town where he grew up.

Phillips explains that the story came to mind in the aftermath of the London bombings of July 7 2005, and particularly after hearing the news that the terrorists were born and raised in Leeds. “My heart sank,” he said, when he discovered that it was not infiltrators from abroad but British citizens from his home town, who had turned their anger inwards and directed it at the very culture in which they grew up.
The Leeds four, he says with gravity, “were as British as I am, and functioned reasonably well in British society.” Yet Phillips’s reaction is not one of complete incomprehension. He sees their actions as being rooted in a deep and worrying disaffection amongst minority groups – particularly Muslims – in both Britain and Europe at large.

During his youth, “the real divisive factor in British and European life was race.” In a comic falsetto, Phillips imitates a well-meaning teacher at school telling him once that the difference between him and his classmates was that he had “just been left in the oven a bit longer, that’s all love.”

But Phillips feels that the alienation felt by minority groups in Britain is very different now than from before. He attributes this change to the “cultural othering” of non-white British people. The racism that appalls us in his story about Ali persists, he argues, in contemporary British society; it is simply expressed in different terms, ones that have been adapted to a climate of skin-deep racial toleration.

So it is, he says, that yesterday’s “Paki-bashing discourse” has become today’s “anti-Muslim rhetoric, delivered with a wink and a nudge.” Such rhetoric, explains Phillips, though not necessarily to blame for the actions of terrorists, is nonetheless an expression of something still deeply implicit in the way Britain treats its minority populations.

If one of Phillips’s reasons for returning to the 1970s is that he believes we have not entirely buried its prejudices, perhaps a stronger motivation is his belief in the importance and power of stories. “Back then,” he explains, “Britain was narrating a harsh narrative to me.” In his essay ‘Extravagant Strangers’ Phillips remarks, “A large part of my British education has involved learning to recognise when fellow citizens are viewing me as little more than the ‘other’.” The theme discussed in the essay – the position of the writer as an outsider – is a recurrent motif in Phillips’ work.

In his latest book, Foreigners, he uses such insights to describe the lives of three black men who, at different points in recent history, attempt (and ultimately fail) to find a place in British society. The book bridges fiction and non-fiction in a way that encourages the reader to see a familiar world from an unfamiliar perspective. Indeed, from both the lecture and his writing, it is clear that a significant part of Phillips’ intention is to question and reshape the “harsh narrative” that he experienced growing up. Central to this project is his faith in “the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows.”

It is clear that he believes that decades of political wrangling have failed to properly resolve the problem of how a single country such as Britain – let alone continental Europe – can fully accommodate people of different races and religions who often hold radically different cultural assumptions and values. If real toleration is to be a possibility then a different approach is required, and Phillips thinks it must involve writers, particularly writers of narrative fiction, and their ability to help bridge gaps of understanding between cultures.

However, when we seek justification for why we ought to behave in a certain way, or why a government ought to enact a certain policy, we turn as a matter of habit toward philosophical arguments, or cite facts about the world that support our case. We are less inclined to look for answers in literature – reading is seen as a leisure activity, and a passive one at that.

But if we see reading a book as entering into a kind of friendship, the act of reading gains significance. Just as keeping the company of people who enrich our understanding of the world is important to us, so too it is with the books we choose to read.
In his lecture, Phillips seeks to assert the importance of fictional writing along similar lines. “The process of daring to imagine yourself into the life of someone who is not you,” he says, “is an act of moral courage.” However, this is accompanied by an anxiety that these capacities are in danger elsewhere in society.

He criticises the adversarial nature of much of our politics and reality TV culture today, drawing an appreciable murmur of approval from the audience. “We don’t have empathy, we have judgment.”

The point that he made throughout his lecture is that our established ways of debating and practising the politics of culture are desperately inadequate for the scale of the task at hand, and that if we are to solve the problems we face, a different kind of engagement is required.

The adaptation from a postcolonial to a multicultural world, which Phillips dubs “the colouring of Europe”, is, he says, “not something that might happen: it has already happened.” In his essay ‘The Pioneers’, he lampoons the old-fashioned definition of England as a nation of stamp-collectors and pigeon-fanciers: “Most Britons,” he wrote, “are no longer interested in the aimless navel-gazing of a George Orwell.” However true this might be, though, there remains a great deal of work to be done in order to understand what causes the cracks and fissures that characterise modern racial and cultural politics.

Phillips’ writing is an attempt to express human life as part of a community. He writes to extend our understanding of what it means to be an outsider; to be surrounded by a culture to which you can never fully belong.

If there is a case for literature’s indispensability, and its ability to transcend the shortcomings of our adversarial and often narrow-mindedly intellectual culture, there can surely be few people better placed to make it than Caryl Phillips.

One Labour man will be smiling, though. James Alexander, the ex-YUSU heavyweight recently nominated as the party’s candidate for the newly-formed York Outer constituency, will need every day that Gordon sends to achieve his objective of becoming the first Union alumnus to make the House of Commons. The boundaries of his seat seem – at least by a quick count of great big houses and shiny cars – to encompass York’s leafiest, Tory-est quarters.

This isn’t to say that Alexander isn’t going to put up a fight. Perhaps only people like me who have been in York far too long will remember his tenure as SU President, but it demonstrated him to be a shrewd communicator and a zealous politician.

He also exhibited some unscrupulous tendencies that make me nervous about his suitability for higher public office, chiefly his willingness to use YUSU’s clout to prevent campus newspapers from reporting on a violent assault committed by then Union Treasurer Ozzy Atton. The principle might have been defensible (although that too is debatable) but selectively applying it for a close friend was not.

There’s certainly no questioning his hunger to win this time round, evident in his self-produced election video on YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/yqgzx4), which adopts the format of an ‘80s weather forecast to portray an earnest, impassioned underdog, somewhere between David Copperfield and a Bible salesman. His rhetoric is of service to residents and of fighting for their interests, but I can’t help thinking that his spiel remains just that: rhetoric.

I find Alexander interesting because he is the embryonic form of the classic career politician, given a spit and polish just in time for the rolling news channels. As YUSU President, Alexander was solely accountable to his electorate – the students. As a Labour party candidate, this won’t be the case, and surely this is the delicate tightrope act of the career politician: professing to be interested in public service, while bending your allegiances to those of a particular party that may have concerns very far removed from those of your own constituents.

None of the main political parties have shown much interest lately in a healthy level of internal debate, of the kind that would allow MPs genuinely to fulfil their representative responsibilities. When Gordon Brown calls the next election, Alexander will be asking students for their support, but it’s unclear what real representation he will offer them in return. Will they be able to trust him to look out for their interests? The jury’s out, but there is at least reason to ask whether his only real interest is the future of James Alexander in the Labour party.

Nearly everything that has been built on campus in the last 20 years has been fudged.

Many have said the project suffers from fatal flaws in conception, that it represents a folly that cannot be rescued by any verve the University might summon. This might be the case, although by whose standards is another question: we all have different priorities, and to hope that a monumental piece of civil and social engineering could satisfy all of them would be comforting but a little optimistic.

Heslington East won’t please everyone: all the same, it would be nice to think that it will please someone. The identity of that someone seems the question to ask from this point onwards. Who are the lucky beneficiaries of the Vice Chancellor’s largesse?

Naturally, it’s not going to be students at the University today. That seems fair enough, since those who have already benefited from their time at York have no right to complain about not receiving the benefits of future plans.

I count myself firmly within this number, having got far more from my years here than I could have bargained for my three grand. I wouldn’t try and place a price on the people I care about here or the time I’ve spent with them – all the same, I’ll happily admit I owe a good measure of both to being at this University.

It’s this affiliation, admittedly as loose and reluctant as I like to keep it, that causes me to fret about the University’s future. I won’t be here in 10 years’ time, but I’d like to think that someone else who will be could get as much out of the place as I have.

This is all the more true since I’ve spent so much of my time here in benign amusement at what a ridiculous place it can be. I’d like things to be better for the class of 10 years hence, and for half a billion pounds, I’ll admit to hoping that a lot of better can be bought.

The campus itself is at least part of the deal, the earth and glass and concrete that will eventually be home to thousands of living, working, drinking students. The Students’ Union have applied pressure for a new central venue on campus to facilitate the last, crucial element of this trio, as well as making recommendations for architects. These are certainly useful things for them to be doing at this stage, even if past experience doesn’t bode well for the weight their input will carry in the end: remember that the barren expanse we now know as the Roger Kirk centre was originally promised to the Union as the proper events venue students had been waiting for since the sixties.

The promised facilities have been a significant part of the University’s pitch for campus two, but far more common to the literature they have produced and the public statements they have made are the kind of determinedly bland statements of intent citing prosperity, diversity and just about anything else that fails to describe the proper aim of a University—satisfying as best as possible the requirements of its students and staff.

It’s understandable enough, given the £2 million that has already been poured into the plans for the new campus, that those in charge feel the need to do a bit of cheerleading; at the moment, though, it has all been directed to those whose approval is required to secure the project’s future, namely the Government and the University’s financial backers.

Hopefully now that the go-ahead has been given, the University can shift focus a little. The VC might have convinced Ruth Kelly, but the student body’s support is going to be a trickier proposition, and I’m afraid I don’t share Rich Croker’s confidence that those “aware of the full picture” are behind the plans. Certainly in principle, most students think a new campus would be good for York—but the kind of campus described in the planning application?

Much-maligned as the current campus is, it’s easy to imagine it being seen as visionary when it was first built in an environment where the concrete jungle was something of a novelty. That it has aged so badly is a testament to how difficult it is to plan 40 years into the future. All the same, there’s something to be said for being bold at the outset.
My worry about Heslington East, in truth, is that it I’m fed up with it already, before the first brick has been laid. I just can’t see what sets it apart from any number of equally uninspiring new developments elsewhere. The difference is that while I don’t have an emotional attachment to multiplexes or shopping centres, I do have quite an attachment to the York campus, and nearly everything that has been built on it in the last 20 years has been fudged. This is a compromise that doesn’t really satisfy anyone except construction firms—the only people involved who have absolutely no stake in how the things they build end up functioning for students and academics.

I’m very much hoping now that the formalities are over with, the University can start making a real case for Heslington East: one that justifies not only its creation, but its existence for the next 40 years. I genuinely hope I’m not disappointed.

Two battlegrounds have loomed large in the run-up to this edition. In one corner of campus, the local elections determined once and for all which political animals would seize control of York’s awesome can recycling and road-widening powers. Meanwhile, generous bucketfuls of Lancastrian blood were spilt out on the Astroturf, as the annals of history were ceremonially rewritten in the annual Roses competition.

Enthusiasm for both these events has run high in the Nouse office the last few weeks. The news team were giddy with excitement at the prospect of another chance to flex their pundit muscles, eagerly ambushing polling stations and pestering beleaguered candidates. More general, however, was the palpable desire shared by all to prove, once and for all, that this newspaper and its staff of sensitive bookish types could adequately cover a major sporting event without getting something catastrophically and embarrassingly wrong.

If I was going to don my battered and tattered cultural commentary hat, I might well opine that politics and sport represent the two last red-blooded activities left for those seeking release in our neutered, consensual society. What I mean by this is that the opportunities for a proper, old-fashioned fight – a real, gritty knee-in-the-ballsack bust-up, with a gloating winner, and a bruised, brave-faced loser – are few and far between these days. Elections and sporting competitions are two rare occasions upon which people can abandon all their pretences to co-operation or tolerance and really, truly hate their neighbour: be he a Tory stuffed shirt, a Labour apparatchik or a Lancastrian scumbag.

The coincidence of the two on the same bank holiday weekend, then, is something close to a dream ticket, particularly for the ravenous hacks of Grimston House: even the fabled ‘other paper’ felt compelled to cut their holiday sort and scamper back to their burrow, even if it was only to use the photocopier. Only one person was left feeling a little confused in the midst of this jamboree of good old-fashioned animosity. That lonely soldier, dear reader, that proverbial nun in a brothel, was yours truly.

I will confess a selective and casual interest in political affairs, in much the same way that someone who once watched Rambo might confess an interest in going to fight in a war. I certainly find it all very interesting, and even occasionally feel compelled to take sides, but the second it turns into something combative, with people staking out their positions and insisting I pick a side, I’m finished. Naked political ambition is the one thing I find truly frightening, and this applies no matter how much I like people personally or agree with their views. There’s just something about elections, and all they involve, that makes me feel uneasy around anyone who takes them seriously.

This lamentable apathy for the democratic process, though, this unfortunate lack of interest in who storms the citadels of power, pales in comparison to the way I feel about the sporting life. Come disbelief, mockery or spitting vitriol from the devout, I remain totally, unreservedly and unapologetically indifferent to the outcome of any sporting event. Football, cricket, rugby, competitive dancing – it doesn’t matter, I just can’t care who wins. It’s not that I hate sport, or even dislike it: I can see perfectly well that many people get a lot out of it, and I will happily sit and watch cricket on a warm summers’ day with a pint. I just don’t care who’s winning at the time, nor do I really understand why I should. And for that reason I will forever remain an intrigued but confused onlooker.

I’m aware this is an unpopular view, particularly on a victorious Roses weekend, and I’d hate to pour cold water on any celebrations, particularly since the rest of this paper is full of them. Personally, I’m delighted we won, because it’s a small reward for the boundless enthusiasm of everyone involved. True, I’ve no idea whatsoever where that enthusiasm comes from – but am grateful all the same that everyone else makes up for my obvious shortcomings, which will leave me forever bored on a Saturday afternoon and doomed to failure in every pub quiz in which I ever partake. I’ll leave it to you to decide who the real winner is.

As has been pointed out, we try pretty hard to cover campus events, particularly Battle of the Bands, and so the suggestion that we’re out to wreck reputations is fairly silly. In general, I find it odd that people assume anyone involved in the campus media is by definition a callous bastard. I’m generally pretty bad at vendettas: I’d feel too guilty if I tried to sustain one for longer than a matter of hours. Besides, more often than not I’ll forget who I hold them against, and end up being nice to people by accident. Everyone else who works on Nouse — with the possible exception of our beloved gonzo attack-dog Mr. Merrill, who holds his vendettas behind his back like poison-tipped daggers — has always seemed to me to be similarly inclined.

After all, things get printed by newspapers because they are newsworthy, and sometimes things that seem newsworthy when you’re rushing to finish an edition turn out later to be dead wrong. We apologise, we move on, hopefully you move on too? Lovely.

Security services are currently studying CCTV tapes from all over campus in order to find out exactly what happened. Nouse has also been investigating all possible means of holding those responsible to account, including legal action.

This situation is totally unprecedented. Whatever your opinion of the newspaper might be, to prevent it from being published is an act of arbitrary censorship, and nothing less. It’s pathetic, immoral, and an act of utter disrespect to everyone who wishes to read Nouse and make their own minds up about what we publish. To deny anyone that right goes against the most basic principles of freedom of expression and opinion, and any attack on them must rest at the top of a very slippery slope.

As usual, we have posted PDF copies of the newspaper, and we encourage you to read it online if you were unable to pick up a copy yesterday. Contrary to the hopes of the individuals responsible, whatever they wished to keep from the campus community will not be suppressed. Finally, we’d encourage anyone with any information that might be helpful to get in touch, either by email to contact@nouse.co.uk, or anonymously in a letter addressed to our usual mailing address, Nouse, Grimston House, Vanbrugh College. For our part, we’re determined to get to the bottom of this, and we’ll be sure to keep you informed of any developments.

Many thanks,

Sam Thomas
Comment Editor

At the ‘Question Time’ session held last Thursday in Derwent bar, YUSU President Rich Croker joined students in levelling questions at the candidates. One candidate has since claimed that some of his questions were directed at her, and represented an “unfair bias”. YUSU has prevented Nouse from revealing the identity of the candidate on the grounds of ‘electoral regulations’.

The candidate, who is also running for Labour Councillor in May, said “It was obvious to anyone watching that Croker asked at least one question directed at me, about the fact that I’m running in the council elections. I don’t know what effect it has on an election when the sabbs express their own preferences so openly.” Procedure requires that all questions from the floor “must be directed to all candidates running for the position,” and not to any specific individual.

When asked about the event, Croker said: “The question I asked was ‘do you have any potential commitments next year that could stop you doing your job properly?’, which I think is a valid question.” He claimed that his question could apply to candidates who wished to continue playing sport on Wednesday afternoons. A source close to the candidate echoed her allegations of bias, labelling the precedent “unhealthy.”

As you’ve probably tired of hearing during your time here, it takes an awful lot to get a York student out of bed in the morning. You’re an apathetic, complacent lot, or so your reputation would have it, and quite happy to laze in bed while the rest of the country’s student activists are out fighting the powers that be tooth and nail.

Thankfully, this is nowhere near the mark. Extensive personal research has revealed other British universities to be little different from here, except with a lot more self-destructive boozing and a marginally lesser degree of institutional incompetence. And it’s the latter to which we must turn if we’re looking for the issue that has finally roused you all from your bleary-eyed slumber. The University, it seems, can take any number of liberties with your education, your social life, your wallet. But heaven forbid they try and take away your porters. In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, this is about drawing a line in the sand. Across this line: you do not cross.

The act of micturation that the University has perpetrated upon the college system has not gone unnoticed, as evidenced by the huge number of signatures, from students and faculty alike, that accompany Nouse’s open letter condemning the situation. Many included their affectionate reminiscences of encounters with the University’s famously unflappable porters, ranging all the way from tending to the injured and drunk to saving the modesty of the blushing and betowelled (or those otherwise caught in a state of dishabille). The recurrent theme of students’ comments, however, was the sense of security that porters provide, and the peace of mind of a friendly face when other sources of help aren’t available.

Maybe there’s something slightly regressive about this. Should students really need twenty-four hour supervision in order to feel secure? They certainly wouldn’t receive it anywhere else, and in this respect the life of an undergraduate is a uniquely coddled one. Still, it’s a stretch to read well-meaning tough love into the University’s actions. There’s little more reason to believe the official line: that reductions in staffing were “unforeseeable”, and not a calculated attempt at whittling down costs.

Only the most naïve have yet to grasp the essential drive behind University decision-making: money talks, and administration listens. That the Students’ Union has long seemed to be in a state of denial over this speaks volumes about its limited stock of independence and gumption, not to mention the powerful strain of paranoid conservatism that has left successive generations of its officers incapable of putting up a real fight against the bureaucratic juggernaut. As the thousand or so signatures on this page attest, York students suffer from no such delusions.

As any seasoned campus observer will be aware, the Students’ Union can work in mysterious ways. Rarely, however, have its limbs managed to pull so violently in opposite directions. As one metaphorical hand snatches risqué magazines from the shelves of Your:Shop, another is making jokes about pulling students. Meanwhile, University bosses look on with studied indifference, siphoning cash off into a cavernous pit a few miles to the east. What is all too easily forgotten amid the light and heat so effortlessly generated by Union officers and keen-eared campus hacks is the real object of the whole enterprise: looking after the interests of students.

All those involved with the bingo hall nudge-winkery insist that despite anything that might have been said, or any scoresheets that that were drawn up, it was all nothing more than a bit of fun; a joke easily made, and even more easily forgotten. It’s perfectly likely that they’re telling the truth. Moreover, anyone tempted to throw down moral standards for others must first realise that they may well end up standing accused of hypocrisy. After all, there are few traits less attractive than criticising the moral pratfalls of others whilst behaving little better one’s self. So, with that in mind, what right do we have to stick our necks out and cast the first stone?

There are two good reasons, and both are matters of that most unfashionable of concepts: integrity. The first and most basic problem is the responsibilities that sabbatical officers take on when they agree to accept a salaried position representing students. What they do in their time off is their own business; they have social lives outside of student politics (at least, you really have to hope that they do) and ought to be allowed to keep them separate and private. So far, so very uncontroversial. When it comes to the welfare of students during Freshers’ Week, however, what they say publicly ought to be no different to what they say behind closed doors. To promise students their welfare is being taken seriously, then to fail to do so when you think that nobody’s listening, is totally indefensible.

That in itself is sanction enough for a slap on the wrist. But there’s another problem, one that goes deeper, and lies at the heart of the uncomfortable truth that most students at York regard their Union as a harmless but ultimately impotent talking shop: If students elect people to fight their corner, not to mention help to pay off their loans into the bargain, they have a right to expect that they’ll stick to the principles on which they were elected. Whatever you think of covering up Nuts to protect Jodie Marsh’s modesty, and there are plenty of reasons to think it’s a pretty silly idea, it is at least easy to square with the Union’s objective of promoting sexual equality. The motion was proposed by the womens’ officers, who are students and work for free: there’s no reason not to trust that they genuinely think it’s the right thing to do by the Union’s policy.

Sabbatical officers are not students. They have no reason to be on campus other than doing the job they are paid for. That’s not to say they can’t still be involved in student life (it would be difficult for them not to be) but it does mean they should take the Union’s policies seriously, in private as much as in public. If they don’t feel they can do that, they can propose whatever changes to them they like. But as long as the YUSU charter contains no explicit mention of the right of officers to the sexual favours of students, they should leave the bingo to women of a certain age: they are, after all, much more likely to win something.

None of this is to say that sabbs aren’t capable of taking their jobs seriously. That would be unfair: anyone unfortunate enough to have experienced a campus election season will know that those who reach the top of the greasy pole are immensely, perhaps even irrationally proud of their positions. It would also be dishonest to ignore the good work that the Union does: for all its shortcomings, its officers do more than anyone else to help the student body limp slowly and reluctantly towards being a vibrant community. But here’s the rub: without the full and active support and, crucially, the respect of every student, the Union has no hope of ever making a lasting difference, especially with University bosses standing in the way. It hasn’t even come close to securing this support, and nothing could do less to stop the rot than the fraternity-style antics of people who really ought to have grown out of it by now.

A leaked memo sent from the Department for Education and Skills to university lecturers and support staff encouraging them to monitor the activities of Muslim and “Asian-looking” students has drawn harsh condemnation from all corners of the academic community.

The guidance, distributed to universities across the UK and reported in The Guardian last month, advises that “universities and colleges provide a fertile recruiting ground” for those involved in terrorist activity. It urges particularly close scrutiny of Islamic student societies, which it claims are susceptible to radicalisation by “extremist individuals.”

Responding to the leaked memo, Professor Haleh Afshar a York academic and leading expert on the politics of Islam and issues of racial equality likened the government’s stance to that of the American government treatment of suspected Communists during the McCarthy era.

Professor Afshar suggested that the memo provides evidence that the government “have now categorised Muslims as ‘the enemy within’.”

Professor Afshar also urged the government to engage with rather than target Muslim students, and to avoid crude approximations of their attitudes.

“If you actually go to the Islamic societies then you will discover a huge diversity of opinion, that Muslims are not monolithic with one view about everything,” she said.
The Equality Challenge Unit, an action group promoting equality and diversity in higher education, also stressed the importance of better communication. “The danger of targeting Muslim students is that it may have a discriminatory impact and any guidance which recommends discriminatory treatment has no place in campus life,” said ECU Chief Executive Nicola Dandridge in a press release. “The guidance should instead address extremism as a whole. It should promote good relations as an established way of minimising conflicts on campus.”

The University has an equal opportunities policy, part of which is intended to implement legislation passed in 2003 to prevent discrimination on grounds of religious belief.
Lecturers and staff across campus dismissed out of hand the notion that they would consider keeping watch on students of a particular race or religion.

“I suppose if I did stumble across some terrible plot, whether constructed by Muslim students or anyone else, I would feel the need to contact the appropriate authorities,” said Dr. Helen Smith, a York English lecturer.

“But that’s a long way from being asked to ‘check up’ on students who are under suspicion only because of their surname or the colour of their skin.”

By Sam Thomas
NEWS CORRESPONDENT

Part of the problem lies in Ade Blackburn’s vocal affectations, which occasionally near the territory of the pub mimic. His dodgy impressions range from a younger, more lucid Mark E. Smith, who presides over some four-square pub thrash to no effect on ‘Tusk’, to a rasping Thom Yorke on ‘Paradise’.

The latter counts as one of the few successes here: lilting whimsy which, ably assisted by a well-placed melodica solo (never a bad idea), becomes more than the sum of its parts. The closing title track also has much to recommend it, not least that it could be incidental music from a Bond film. But the song’s refrain lays bare the real issue here: “just don’t get close,” Blackburn cautions. Anyone choosing to ignore him will see that there’s not much holding these songs together.

Out 16/10/06

His career was ended abruptly last October, when the government withdrew him as ambassador and suspended him for “gross misconduct”. An internal investigation accused him of drunkenness and sexual misconduct. The Foreign Office subsequently dropped all the charges, which Mr. Murray has always maintained were groundless.

Many, including Mr. Murray himself, have instead attributed the termination of the former ambassador’s diplomatic career to his outspoken comments on the Uzbek regime. Uzbekistan’s political leaders have been repeatedly condemned by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for suppressing opposition and torturing political prisoners.

Upon becoming ambassador, Mr. Murray commented, “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy”. It was to be the first of many occasions upon which he unsettled his superiors by criticising the authoritarian government of President Islom Karimov. Mr. Karimov had previously led the Communist party before Uzbekistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

For all the controversy that has surrounded Mr. Murray’s recent career, in person he is extraordireserved, although – as might be expected – not wholly diplomatic. Giving a talk at the University of York last month, at the invitation of the U.N. Society, Mr. Murray’s reputation as a thorn in the side of the Foreign Office and, it has been suggested, that of the Bush administration, was evident. His sentiment was borne out by the quiet ferocity with which he criticised both.

His principle claim is that the Karimov regime has consistently used the ‘war on terror’ as a cover for the suppression of political opposition within Uzbekistan, and that the Americans and British have been complicit with this in their use of intelligence obtained by the Uzbek government using torture. According to Mr. Murray, dissidents are tried on spurious allegations linking them to Al Queda, and are forced to confess under torture.

He recalls a man he met at a political trial, who claimed to have been forced to admit cooperating with Osama bin Laden as his children were tortured in front of him. Sitting two feet away from the man as he explained what had happened, Mr. Murray explains simply that he “felt it was true”.

Increasingly concerned that intelligence crossing his desk from the Uzbek services (which passed through the C.I.A. and then M.I.6. to reach him) had been gathered by inhumane means, Mr. Murray dispatched his deputy to see the American Head of Intelligence in Tashkent. He reports the reply she returned with, summarising the C.I.A. position: “It probably is obtained by torture. We don’t consider it a problem.”

Returning to Whitehall, he spoke to Sir Michael Wood, legal adviser to the Foreign Office. Seeking an assurance that no intelligence known to have been obtained under torture was being used by the British government. Mr. Murray was instead told that “it would be irresponsible to ignore information relevant to the war on terror”. His public reluctance to accept this state of affairs, which resulted in his being told he was “considered to be unpatriotic” by his line manager at the Foreign Office, was, he claims, the reason for his eventual removal as ambassador.
Mr. Murray feels that there is an unavoidable contradiction in the willingness on the part of the U.S. and U.K. to tacitly accept the torture of political prisoners in exchange for intelligence. Referring to the Bush administration’s professed aim of spreading democracy and freedom in Iraq and elsewhere, he asks, “How can we do that there when we are backing one of the world’s most vicious dictators in Uzbekistan?” Recalling his first conversation with Mr. Karimov, whom he characterises as both well informed and highly intelligent, Mr. Murray describes how the President pre-empted any criticism of his own regime’s human rights record by pointing out to the ambassador that Britain itself had opted out of the E.U. Convention on Human Rights. Such a parallel being drawn by the head of a near-totalitarian state with the U.K., is not a comforting idea.

Asked whether he sees any connection between the creeping acceptance of torture in intelligence gathering, and the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq, Mr. Murray agrees. He explained that “shocking events do for a while blur sensibility”. “I think it is a cultural shift”, he adds, and compares the aftermath of the September 11th attacks with that of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, identifying a “temporary brutalisation of society” that can make what was previously distasteful – in the case of the Indian Mutiny, barbaric and repressive – acceptable.

A desensitisation towards torture on the part of the U.S. government is becoming apparent. In a recent report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker on the covert practice of “extraordireserved, nary rendition” allegedly carried out by the C.I.A., Mr. Murray is quoted as having reason to believe that on “at least three” occasions suspected militants had been transported from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan by the Americans in order that they might be interrogated in ways that were outside the usual boundaries of human rights law.

From a British perspective, Mr. Murray observes that a “terrible thing happened in the Civil Service” following the September 11th attacks. Criticism of the new ‘war on terror’, he argues, is increasingly unacceptable within a Civil Service that is no longer impartial. He ascribes this particularly to the close cooperation between the Blair government and the Bush administration.

His criticism of Labour also extends to issues of civil liberties within the U.K. Discussing the new anti-terror legislation proposed by the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, he asks: “who’s seen the emergency?” Adding that “nobody in the U.K. has ever been killed by an Islamic terrorist”, he likens the situation to a “case of the emperor’s new clothes”. His suspicion at the justification offered for abuses of human rights both abroad and at home is all too evident. We have, he argues, “lost all perspective of legality in international relations”. This is a grim assessment to be made by a man who until last year was responsible for high-level diplomacy.

For this reason, stated Mr. Murray, he plans to step into the political arena at the forthcoming general election by standing as an independent candidate against the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in his Blackburn constituency. Commenting on this new directon, Mr. Murray agrees that it represents a radical change from the aloof impartiality of the diplomatic service, but claims that it is “nice to be able to go out and tell people what I actually think”. His conviction that the Labour government is now entirely subservient to America in foreign policy, is hardly a new analysis in recent left-wing discourse. Craig Murray, however, may well be better placed and better informed than most to make the case for it, and moreover for the primacy of respect for human rights.