Tram Talk

By AM Thursday, December 1, 2011

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A brouhaha has stirred this week after YouTube featured a video clip showing a London tram passenger expressing racial sentiment by the bagful. With infant in lap she sat there and laid it on thick to people of black skin and Poles. It was a racist rant in which those who spoke differently or appeared as something other than white were urged to go back to their ‘own’ countries and leave ‘my Britain’ alone.

To get some sense of perspective, the British National Party is able to have its members returned to the European parliament and to have councillors elected in Britain while soccer stars, role models for numerous young in British society, are increasingly being accused of racist behaviour on the pitch. Yet an incident as minor as somebody with bigoted views, seemingly full of the booze or something else, giving off on a tram has a large swathe of the British public transfixed.  It provoked nothing short of outrage.

There were calls for the arrest of the woman, that she should face deportation (to where exactly?),  that her child should even be taken from her.  As a consequence British police arrested a 34 year old woman, Emma West, for a ‘racially aggravated’ public order offence. Although facing at most a prison sentence of six months, West has been remanded in custody in what seems an overzealous display of judicial authority. 

The incident has prompted serious discussion as well as ranting in the British national press and on the internet.  Padraig Reidy of Index On Censorship has approached the matter from the angle of the surveillance society he thinks Britain is well on the way to becoming. He drew attention to how power anonymously and invisibly, fragmented and dispersed, is turning Britain into a surveillance society where neighbour spies on neighbour without having to await official endorsement or coordination.  He compared the culture to the Stasi regime in the former East Germany: ‘are we willingly becoming a citizen Stasi, happy to record and report each other’s behaviour?’

Some have dismissed this as hyperbole. Yet Reidy is merely flagging up through the prism of a response to a specific incident the wider threat to civil liberties that is growing as a result of citizens vying to turn each other in on the basis of what they say or think. Consider Kevin Rooney’s views expressed on spiked about soccer rivalries in Glasgow which often express themselves in internet spats and ribald song singing and which has also seen one seventeen year old hauled off to prison for ‘religiously aggravated’ offences.

In Scotland, sadly, what people say and write is now sufficient criteria for imprisoning them, as the centuries-old distinction between words and action is abolished ... The criminalisation and demonisation of Old Firm football fans by the massed ranks of the Scottish government, police and media is a serious problem. Far from reducing ‘sectarian conflict’ in Scottish football, the new censorious laws and the accompanying police campaign have led to a dramatic increase in tensions, with fans now encouraged to spy on each other, to take offence at every comment, and to report rival fans to the police. In a very vicious cycle, the more rival fans are coaxed and cajoled into reporting offensive incidents, then the more arrests there are, and the more the authorities can cite such increases in arrests as a justification for tough new laws and sanctions.

If this is the way British society wants to go someone should take the time to explain what difference exists between a transparent society and a surveillance society. The distinction seems not to have been spelt out. Where does transparency end and surveillance begin? What seems very transparent is that citizens are cheering rather than mourning the slow death of civil liberties.

There is a view that the recording of the event on the tram was an example of citizen journalism. Perhaps, but if it is journalism it is hardly of the responsible type. The ‘journalist’ concerned plastered the results of their work on YouTube with absolutely no regard for the infant whose features are as clear as the woman in whose lap he was seated. If the police come demanding the contents of the ‘journalists’ phone so that it may be used in evidence against the accused woman, will the ‘journalist’ submit to state authority and allow the material on her phone to become evidence as distinct from public information? Will the journalist be prepared to face prison rather than hand the recording over? Unless they are prepared to take these personal losses in defence of journalism the claim that this is citizen journalism should be taken no more seriously than a claim that recording a tune for web upload makes the person responsible a music producer.

Sunny Hundal in the Guardian said that while he abhorred having to defend such a person he nevertheless felt that using the law to resolve what was clearly unacceptable behaviour was not the right way to go. ‘And let's be honest, the woman was just sitting there with a child on her lap. She offended people but posed no threat and didn't harm anyone.’ It was a rant about immigration. It is probably the sort of thing that takes place in pubs throughout Britain every weekend if not during the week as well. Sure, the views expressed were odious. It is even more odious that she should be jailed for them.