So that’s the problem solved then. After an outburst of racism, all we had to do was to lock up the rioters, throw away the key and everything can now return to normal.
That was Keir Starmer’s attitude to the violence, which was echoed in a self-congratulatory Stormont. Like the unionist response to rioting in the Bogside in 1969, both Stormont and Westminster depicted racism as a problem of law and order (and we know how that turned out).
Politicians here and in Britain condemned the violence, but few explained it. In speeches ranging from the sanctimonious to the self-promotional, one sensible voice rang out. Appropriately it came from an immigrant. Step forward, Lilian Seenoi-Barr, Mayor of Derry and Strabane.
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In an interview with this newspaper, she described the “wave of anti-immigrant sentiment” as “heartbreaking” – and then she offered an analysis. She pointed the finger at Westminster and a dysfunctional Stormont for the collapse of public services in health, welfare, education and housing.
Poverty and deprivation are well-proven recruiting grounds for right-wing agitators. Following his election, Starmer upheld the Tory policy of providing financial support to only the first two children in a family. It is a major contributory factor to widespread poverty. He then ignored the role which poverty played in the riots.
Over here, Stormont plans to build only 400 new social homes this year, a 73% decrease on last year. There are 47,000 households on the waiting list. There are over 500,000 on the health waiting lists.
In response to the riots, Stormont agreed to introduce “a refugee integration strategy”. It has no strategies for tackling deprivation in health, housing or welfare.
The deprived wrongly blame their deprivation on immigrants, or those of a different religion. The Irish should know this better than most. When a group of Sisters of Mercy, headed by Newry woman, Mother Mary Baptist (Kate Russell) arrived in San Francisco in an economic depression in 1854, one newspaper identified them, along with prostitution and corruption, as a threat to society.
As Irish Catholics they were unwelcome foreigners, but they are honoured today as having founded San Francisco’s health system.
Since all executive education ministers have come from either SF or the DUP, it is no surprise that our education system does not teach the causes of social and economic inequality: some have so little because others have so much. They propagate that inequality by branding 57% of our 11-year-olds as educational failures.
What rioters need is not a three-year prison sentence, but a three-year education programme. That’s why Lilian Seenoi-Barr placed responsibility for the racist violence on the “narratives created by political leaders who have failed us all”.
She is a member of the Maasai people in what we now call Kenya and Tanzania (two artificial colonial states, so she should feel at home here). Traditionally nomadic cattle herders, the Maasai lost two thirds of their land through treaties in 1904 and 1911, both later broken by Britain. Post-colonial independence changed nothing.
In response to the riots, Stormont agreed to introduce “a refugee integration strategy”. It has no strategies for tackling deprivation in health, housing or welfare
Today the Maasai rely heavily on tourism, much of which is exploitive. (The British called them Masai, not Maasai, which means speakers of the language Maa. When studying them at university here, we were taught only the British spelling.)
Derry’s Lord Mayor recognises that racism can be exploited most readily among the aggrieved. Brexit was significantly a working-class, protest vote. Having achieved little through Brexit, the grievance focused on migrants.
While opposition to racism here was welcome, if we were to rally against the collapse of our public services, racism would have a less fertile breeding ground. We protest against the consequences of failed public services, but not the causes. Why not recall Stormont to address the crisis in the health service?
Political parties condemned the riots but accepted no responsibility for contributing to the conditions which helped to create them. That responsibility lies to a significant extent with Stormont, where Sinn Féin and the DUP have presided over the Americanisation of our public service for the past 25 years.
They shouted loudest against racism. No-one noticed that the 1997 Race Relations Act includes nationality within the definition of racial discrimination. That raises the question: was the IRA’s 30-year war for ‘Brits out’ racist? If so, would SF call that racism inevitable? Is the DUP’s anti-Irish sentiment racist? Indeed, how far from racism is some electioneering here?
By importing clarity of thought into a largely unthinking society, Lilian Seenoi-Barr represents another benefit of immigration. We need more people like her.
