I have just been accused of being racist because I pointed out to someone that having people selling their children five minutes away from your house is not a good advert for globalisation.

Rather than thinking about it, the person simply called me a racist.  Not surprisingly, this means the conversation is over.

For the benefit of less regular readers, I am a former ethnic minority specialist interviewer.  I am far from racist.  I do have a problem with being unable to mention that I do not find it acceptable to have trafficked prostitutes and the prostituting of children happening unchecked in the UK, which is what is happening.

The person concerned assumed that these people were selling their children because they need the money.  This is not the case.  They have housing, a social network, work, and enough money to have the children in the first place, which is more than I have.

Mentioning it, however, is racist.  It is racist because this guy has none of these issues on his doorstep, and because he has not considered that other cultures are different from his.  Honour killing is still acceptable in some cultures, therefore it is not a huge jump to sell your daughter to a nearby bidder, thereby reducing your food costs and perhaps having enough money to have another child.

From my perspective, it is more racist to assume that just because we have determined that this is not acceptable to us, that the presumption is that you are supposed to be a social worker and, I assume, go around to their house and tell them how to live.  I doubt very much that any unfortunate immigrant has gone to this guy’s house and suggested that he should sell his daughter.  Why then, does he think that we have the right to determine what is right and wrong for this immigrant group, who are behaving in exactly the same way they behaved in Czechoslovakia, Slovenia and several other countries in Eastern Europe?

Likewise, police in the North of England are still shy about concerning themselves with multi-cultural cases of child-grooming.  How long before we grow out of this veiled racist idea of liberalism, where saying anything makes you a pariah?

Can you see how that works?  There is no moral high ground to take.  Either you accept globalisation, increased competition for wages, other culture’s ideas of right and wrong or you decide that no, borders are helpful.  It is ironic that this guy lives in the most protectionist country in the world as he virtue signals at me, whilst not listening to actual problems from a country doing exactly as he suggests.

From a sociological perspective, ghettos forming shortly after new populations enter the country is normal, and it always provokes an upsurge in racist behaviour from people who get fed up having to be accompanied in a neighbourhood they were born in in case of attack. (I was assaulted in the same area I refer to, but I am thinking here of a gentleman who now has to take a taxi 200 yards to the pub because he is not safe.)  I wonder how my snowflake chum would feel about entering a gang fight to get to the child-sellers to provide his idea of ‘help?’

We often glorify our Polish workers.  Meanwhile in Poland they instead take on slave work gangs from North Korea and poorly paid workers from Portugal who cannot get work at home.  The Polish government have also refused point blank to take any Muslims because of their history.  I interviewed one man from Poland who was earning less than I was as a part-time interviewer despite running a huge corporate building site.  What on earth is liberal or fair about that?  What is liberal about the videos of what Polish people like to do to immigrants at home?

Getting people to actually think is not worth the effort, quite a lot of the time, and you do wonder what the outcome of this fear of discussion is likely to be.  As far as I can see, it is designed to create dissent and prevent communication of any kind.  Fear is going to be the destruction of any recognisable form of society.  An excellent climate for the removal of human rights or concern for others on any basis at all.

In your battle to stagger through life, there are two big enemies you should avoid.  Blame and Shame.  If there is anything I have learned from my narc sister, it is that people who are devoid of either get on far better in life.  It is much better to have a personality so devoid of empathy or reason that you don’t ever experience any.  Not only are you happier, you can leave everyone else eating your dust whilst you move on to your next miserable task.

I wept for years over the behaviour of my siblings towards my mother.  No decent person could be invited into my life, I thought.  To make matters worse, the only positive person I knew had not turned out to be particularly positive in reality.

I regarded it as a smirch on my character, that three people who clearly regarded themselves as superior would behave in such a shoddy, selfish way.  It took several years for me to wake up one morning and say “Wait a minute, I have taken care of both of their parents.  I have given up any decent prospects to do so, and in addition I have repaired the family home at considerable expense of my time and money whilst they did nothing.  Why am I still hearing tales of how selfish and nasty I am when I stopped speaking to them several years ago?”

This behaviour is called mobbing, and it is employed by stupid and deranged people to avoid responsibility for either helping or acknowledging anything you are doing.  It is classic amongst non-caring children.  It is a reason to do nothing.  As long as they can make your life miserable, they have the excuse to then make your reaction to that, which in my case was to completely ignore them, into a good reason for being even more abusive.  They will continue to do this as long as nobody from outside the family points it out, and nobody ever does.  There is no mechanism for protecting carers from this form of abuse at all.  Try searching for examples online, and you will not find any.  I tried. It is rife, and yet there is no protection at all.

This is exactly how the public behave.  Instead of taking any responsibility for making political decisions and employing anything in the way of actual reason to do so, they elect to delegate it by voting.  A vote for conservative used to mean belief in the monarchy, in militarism and international standing.  It now simply means that you consider the Conservatives to be better at making a more advantageous deal than anybody else, and to hell with the dead people.

“Things were better when there were gentlemen in charge.”

This was said by an elderly neighbour within my lifetime.  This is a hangover from when it was considered noble to serve the public.  The gentlemen in question frequently left their estates to the public.  This is no longer how the class system operates, as I have previously mentioned.  Those gentlemen no longer exist.  To be a well-educated member of the upper classes now means that you are better at taking things than anyone else, a throwback to how many prominent aristocratic families got their status in the first place.  It was highly relevant and useful when we were still conquering uncharted territory, but it does not work so well when the only thing left to take is right here.  You may consider it astonishing that people who have every advantage seek to take more from you, but it is a dog-eat-dog world.

If you are, therefore, in a favoured position as a result of association with such people, it is far more difficult to express the ghastly horror when they take it one step too far, especially when you are conditioned to accept that they are also inclined to ‘mob’ you in much the same way a vile family does.

The recent experience of the last few years has taught me this:  Sometimes it is expedient to employ the methods of the enemy to do the right thing.  Ditch the blame and shame.  Concentrate on what you are good at.  By all means internally acknowledge your mistakes, but focus on what works in terms of moving forward.  Build some new bridges.

I have moved on from the shame of having a repulsive family of money-grubbers, to experiencing shame at being in love with someone that I had no way of knowing was married when I exchanged a few sentences with him.  I refuse to feel bad about it.  There is no way that even I can twist it into being my fault.

Remember – strategy is our thing – focus on that.

I may have to rethink my strategy for the new project.  I will keep you in the loop over the next few weeks, but it looks as if I will be earning the funding, at least.

Toodle pip,

Ina

I have heard so many ridiculous things from people who have never stepped outside their own limitations in the course of my life that I have now come to this conclusion.

I have had many wry smiles at the events of the last decade or so, particularly with the attitudes of my occasional long term boyfriends. (occasional because they have been around for thirty years and I have maybe spent three months with them in total over that time) I have, as a consequence, developed a healthy disrespect for opinions, since they tend to be formed without much in the way of research.

As I was scribbling the latest short story, it occurred to me that a lot of British culture is about disdain.  Disdain for people outside of one’s class, disdain for people who are socially mobile, disdain for people who are new, disdain for people who are different.  I lived in England for a period in the nineties, and I can honestly count on one hand the number of times anyone gave me any nonsense because I was Scottish.  I cannot say the same thing now.  On my recent trip to see Wolfe, I noticed heads jerking in my direction as soon as I was over the border.  I presume this is media influence. I amused myself by considering that I was braving enemy territory to catch a glimpse of my beloved.

Now, this could be because I am rather class  neutral.  I went to a very tiresome state school, and yet am considerably posher than my privately educated siblings.  I put it down to the binge reading of Wodehouse and a lot of Russian and French philosophers in my formative years, but it could also just be a pose, I don’t know.  I know I have managed to blend in equally well working in the best and worst areas of Glasgow in the course of my research work.

I also transplant easily into rural areas, because I chose to leave Glasgow at 17.  I have lived everywhere from a tin shack on an island farm to a stately home, thereby becoming unclassifiable.

So, when my friends assert that ‘posh gits’ are ‘snobs’ and that I cannot possibly understand why they would say this because I am also comparatively posh, it is very easy for me to wonder if they know what snobbery actually is?

Glasgow has always been particularly stratified.  Different areas don’t like each other.  People will even take a dislike to you because you aren’t interested in hair care products, or because you don’t dress like them.  People used to be segregated on the grounds of being Protestant or Catholic and it is said that the council is still run in this way.  (as someone who is neither of those things, it has always been amusing introducing people to theology during the tentative questioning) Opening your mouth to speak at all can be a problem, and God help you if you actually know anything, because this is ‘giving yourself airs.’  It is a huge failure as a national culture that many Scots just don’t like it if anyone achieves anything.  Even doing something is a problem, as I found out when I did my micro survey to find out if people in the ‘Yes’ movement really understood the figures they were quoting.  I was challenged on the usual basis – “Whit ye dayn that fur?  Who does that cow think she is?”  It is not particularly encouraging for the future that the only way people can agree is if they all slavishly worship individuals and nobody else is allowed to speak.

In considering the ‘No Glass Walls’ project, I am led to consider what is universally appealing.  Many of the things I find funny are sources of boiling fury for others, and my long view of history and decision making are simply not relevant if you are worrying about feeding the cat.  It is difficult to find something universally appealing in a country so obsessed with hate.  Hate the Scots, hate the Lancastrians if you are from Yorkshire, hate the Londoners, hate the Brummies.  I would like to say that English people hate even more than Scots do, but I am not sure that this is really the case.

This leads me to wonder how Britain has been so successful in the ‘Divide and Conquer’ policy within the state.  I look at the USA and see something similar, but they have the benefit of a stratified junk education system to help things along.  Here, there is absolutely nothing to stop you taking your state education and working your way up to Prime Minister if you are able to do the networking and put the hours in.  It isn’t miraculous, it is simply the decisions you make and the work you put in.

So, I wonder, as a mute project, as it will have to be, what is the best way of expressing this self-limiting culture we have created?  How to get people out of their chosen discomfort zone?  The class war is just strata, along with all the other self-made strata people actively choose to maintain.

Here’s a nice piccy of Boris.  I have prepared it in ultra-high resolution for use later.

I have so far come up with a long, long list of things I would like to bring up in the course of the project.  I will need to involve quite a number of interest groups.

Just to make something clear for people who aren’t quite understanding why a genetically predisposed revolutionary Scottish Nationalist is a Boris superfan, there is no malicious intent at all.  I just came up with a rather nice set of ideas which happen to work well together, and I am sure even Boris would agree if it was discussed in any depth.

It is very important to establish that the Conservative party – the party of tradition and maintaining the status quo – develops a  memory at some point.  There have been times in the struggle between right and left, when the right have actually been right.  Boris, as a fellow history buff, will be aware of the ebb and flow of Conservative history, and, subject to the inevitable shooting of the rapids that is actually being in parliament, I am sure he will remember some of the more useful elements of British conservatism if he chooses to think about it.

As I have previously mentioned, Disraeli is a whole lot more useful than Churchill. Whilst I do not forsee ever wanting to actually vote for them, taking my usual interest in their mutual backstabbing is always fun.

Anyway, there is a lot of work to do before I can proceed with the performance component of the project.

Have fun in the meantime,

Ina