Copy and paste for all

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Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, yesterday invited former German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to “promote internet freedom globally”.
Mr zu Guttenberg is an interesting choice for this position. It doesn’t take much digging through his CV, even for non-German-speakers, to find that he has had personal – and recent – experience of the power of the internet. It was barely a year ago that a web-based collaboration of scientists and citizens demonstrated that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis was shamelessly plagiarised from over 130 different sources. There is barely a page in the work that doesn’t contain a plagiarised passage. Nearly two thirds of the text are copy-and-pasted – unattributed – from a variety of other works, including the essay of a first-year student and the writings of some of Mr zu Guttenberg’s party colleagues. Ultimately, this cost Mr zu Guttenberg his job as Defence Minister back in March.
Commissioner Kroes justified her choice of consultant saying she wanted “talent, not saints”. Yet surely the fact that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis is barren of original thought shows that the one thing he lacks is talent. Given the challenges facing online activists in authoritarian regimes, one has to question Ms Kroes’ judgement on this matter. In a world where news is constantly manipulated to somebody’s advantage, trust is the rarest of commodities. Any blogger or activist wishing to be truly effective, to really touch and inspire people, needs to earn their readers’ trust while at the same time walking the fine line of ensuring their own personal safety. Disappearances and crackdowns on Chinese bloggers illustrate the importance of anonymity for personal safety. Conversely, the case of “Amina Arraf” or “Gay Girl in Damascus” – a blog which turned out to be run by a middle-aged American man – shows both the potential of the internet to truly touch people, and the disappointment which results when trust between blogger and reader is breached.
Ultimately, when the commodity you are trading in is trust, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the last person you want fighting your corner.

Ever closer union

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So Dave used his veto. That must have made him feel manly, and powerful, and in control. For all of twelve seconds. Until someone pointed out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
What strikes me about this sorry mess is how short a time it has taken for the “we must protect the City at all costs” attitude to become acceptable again. Rewind, if you will, back to 2008. Remember the collapse of Lehman Brothers? The credit crunch and the global liquidity crisis? The resulting recession and flatlining of the UK economy? Am I the only one who remembers the intellectual discourse of 2008/09 questioning whether capitalism had failed, whether the financial system was fit for purpose? Did I hallucinate all these things?
Well, apparently not. It was earlier this year that Mr Cameron’s own Business Secretary was still talking about banking reform and splitting retail and investment banking activities. Back in 2008, David Cameron himself said (emphasis mine),

I’m pleased that the European regulators are looking at our proposal to bring stability to the banking system.

and

Many bankers in the City were quite simply irresponsible.
They paid themselves vast rewards when it was all going well……
…and the minute it went wrong, they came running to us to bail them out.
There will be a day of reckoning but today is not that day.

And yet, not only has that day of reckoning not come; barely three years later it seems to be perfectly acceptable for the Prime Minister to put Britain’s membership of the European Union and the country’s standing in foreign policy at risk in order to protect those very same financial institutions for which he promised a day of reckoning. I seem to have blinked and missed something. What happened?
A second question here has to be what the hell have the Lib Dems done? The Deputy Prime Minister claims to be “bitterly disappointed”, almost as if the situation was nothing to do with him. But where was Mr Clegg last week when Britain’s negotiating position for the EU summit was being decided?
In Germany, Cameron’s name is becoming a by-word for causing a breach with Europe (German link). Much like Mr Cameron, the FDP – the junior partner in the German coalition government – are playing party politics with the future of Europe. Much like Mr Cameron, they are being petty, irresponsible, and myopic.

[Elsewhere] Uniquely Scottish Tory

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When asked to justify her deviation from mainstream Tory policy in the area of child care, newly elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson seemed to imply that this was a uniquely Scottish issue which needed a uniquely Scottish solution.
Commendable and progressive though Ms. Davidson’s engagement in the area of child care is, this is not an issue that is particular to Scotland. All over the UK, families find themselves in a position where both parents either need or want to work, and where child care is inaccessible or affordable only to those whose incomes rival the Prime Minister’s. If I was making a case for Scotland’s need for unique policies or solutions – either under a devolved or independent arrangement – the area I would be most inclined to look at is pensions.
Read more over at Scottish Times.

[Elsewhere] God help us. The Revolution runs on Windows.

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Last weekend, I found myself at a loose end in London for a couple of hours so thought I’d look in on Occupy LSX. I pottered about, had a few chats, helped put up some posters and headed over to the tech tent. I only had a brief chat with the guys there, but was dismayed to discover that most of their kit was running on Windows XP. The reason, they said, was that Windows was what most people were familiar with. They had one Ubuntu box which was currently not around, and were toying with the idea of maybe putting Linux Mint on a couple of the machines, but it wasn’t a high priority. My jaw was on the floor.
Read more over on ORGZine.

Sex is not the enemy (*)

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(*)The title of this blog post is taken from a (NSFW) tumblr.
I spent yesterday at Fem11, the feminist conference organised by UK Feminista. It was great to be in a room with a thousand other feminists, and you know your event is successful when the hashtag on Twitter attracts both trolls and spammers. Sessions at the conference covered a wide variety of subjects, from violence against women, through abortion and the plight of asylum seekers. As usual, I wished there were two of me so I could attend more of the sessions.
There were a few themes through the day, but the one that really struck me was around sexualisation, objectification and the sex industry. The opening session had Cllr Rania Khan speaking about her campaign against lapdancing clubs, Isabella Woolford Diaz telling us about tackling lads’ mags in Tesco, and Bjorn Suttka introducing the Anti-Porn Men Project. The absolutely packed workshop on ending violence against women covered a lot of ground, including exploring the role of sexualisation and objectification of women in creating an environment conducive to violence against women.
A session by campaign group Object showcased their campaigns against lapdancing clubs, lads’ mags, demand for prostitution, Page 3 and Miss World. Some of these were highly satisfying. There is something inspiring about a representative of the lads’ mags industry being intellectually floored on live television by Object’s extremely articulate campaign manager Anna van Heeswijk.
During Feminist Question Time, we were told by Matt McCormack Evans (founder of the Anti-Porn Men Project) that a feminist future could not exist with the sex industry. Thundering applause from a thousand feminists followed.
Yet I find this debate somewhat one-sided. One or two voices suggested alternatives. One woman brought up the subject of women working in the sex industry by choice. This was not addressed – we were just given more statistics about the women who are forced to work there. Another audience member posed the question of what impact the closure of some lapdancing clubs following stricter regulation would have on the women working there. This was met with yet another explanation of the terrible working conditions for women in these clubs. Yet in no other industry would we see appalling working conditions and campaign for the entire industry to be shut down. We would campaign for those working conditions to improve.
To me, the objectification debate as presented yesterday at Fem11 seems to miss the point. Sex is not the enemy. Heck, porn isn’t even the enemy. As you may have spotted if you followed the link to the tumblr this post takes its title from, porn doesn’t have to objectify and exploit women. Just as it’s possible for pornography to promote objectification, it can also promote values like respect, consent, safety, pleasure and joy.
The issue we face is much bigger, and when we strike at pornography or lapdancing clubs or lads’ mags, we are only striking at expressions of a bigger underlying problem, cutting off the hydra’s head so it can grow two new ones. The issue is that objectification and exploitation of women is the only socially and culturally sanctioned expression of sexuality – for both men and women. Take a step back. Read that sentence again. Think about it. It’s important.
If we truly want a feminist future of gender equality and respect, we can’t start with pornography and lads’ mags – we have to start with the romantic comedy which teaches us, before anything else does, that the only sex that “counts” is penis-in-vagina sex where the man has an orgasm. More to the point, we can’t just fight against things we don’t want – we have to create a positive vision of what we do want. We have to establish a space, an environment, a culture where men and women can explore and express their sexuality free from gender norms, social expectations and moralising. As @feorag put it, sex negativity is as objectifying as the current social norms: humans have emotions and feelings, and lust is one of them. We can’t replace one type of objectification with another. We can’t just have half the debate.
We freak out about the message pornography and lads’ mags send to children and young people about sex and relationships between men and women. In many cases, this message is truly harmful. What we need to do is give young people the tools to engage with and question that message. We need to enable them to explore their own sexuality, find what feels right for them, escape the limiting social norms they are currently presented with. We need to give parents and teachers the tools to help young people do this. We need to create safe spaces – not just for young people but for all of us – where sexuality can be discussed in an open and honest way, without fear of being judged. We need to make information available to help people separate fact from fiction when it comes to sexuality.
Some of this work is already happening. Brook do an amazing job engaging with young people on the subject of sex, sexuality and sexual health. Blogs like Sex Is Not The Enemy challenge our perception both of pornography and of the socially acceptable expressions of sexuality. Shops like Sh! provide a safe space for women to engage with their own sexuality, light years away from the unimaginative exhibitionism of Anne Summers or the seedy places from which men emerge looking shifty and carrying non-descript paper bags.
We need to welcome work like this into the mainstream of feminism. We need to have the other half of the debate. If we do not, we are making it more difficult to achieve our objective of gender equality, and we are actively harming women, men and young people who are trapped by the objectifying, exploitative socially acceptable expressions of sexuality.

Economic Literacy Tuesday

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The Ernst & Young ITEM Club – an independent economic forecasting think tank which uses the same economic models as the Treasury – yesterday published a report on the inflation outlook for the UK over the short to medium term [PDF]. Coverage of this has been slow and not terribly helpful. I caught a snippet on Radio 4, but to get anything even vaguely meaningful, you would have had to listen to Radio 5 Live’s Wake up to Money at 5.30 yesterday morning.
On “Wake up to Money”, Neil Blake, a senior economic advisor at the ITEM club suggested that a lot of the inflation we have seen over the last three or so years has been “imported” or outside the control of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This kind of imported inflation was due to sharp increases in commodity prices, primarily food and energy. “Domestically generated inflation”, he said, was relatively low. Given the economic outlook, Mr. Blake suggested, the MPC’s current inflation target of 2% may be unrealistic and he proposed two options for addressing this:

  • Option 1 would be to increase the MPC’s inflation target. Even a modest increase of half a percentage point for 2.5% would give the MPC considerable flexibility to absorb imported inflation.
  • Option 2 would be to target a different measure of inflation – one that allowed us to strip out elements beyond our control such as food and energy, and enabled us to focus on the “domestically generated” part of inflation.

It is that “domestically generated” inflation that I want to look at. In basic terms, inflation is a general rise in prices: items which yesterday cost you £1 to buy today cost £1.02. The same amount of money, therefore, buys less “stuff”. Obviously increased prices of raw materials or energy will have an impact on inflation. So will raising sales taxes such as VAT – something which has happened twice in the last two years, once at the reversal of the temporary VAT cut and once at the beginning to this year when the rate went up to 20%. These are either external factors beyond our control or one-off occurrences which will not affect inflation next year. There are, however, other factors domestic factors which can influence inflation, and by far the biggest of those is wages, followed by profits. These are the “domestically generated” pressures on prices and components of inflation. What Neil Blake is therefore saying is that while food and energy prices will continue to rise and that is beyond the MPC’s control, one way of keeping inflation down is to focus on – essentially – keeping wages down. It is an interesting euphemism, that “domestically generated inflation”.
In all fairness, if you read the full ITEM Club report, a slightly different picture emerges. Far from making any specific recommendations, the report acknowledges the weaknesses of both options. It stresses that any attempt to keep the domestically generated parts of inflation down is likely to have a strong negative impact on growth and thus highlights the challenges facing policy makers. It also looks at the shares of wages and profits in gross output – in other words, how much of GDP goes to labour and how much to capital. There are a few items of note here:

  • Over the last 40 years, there is a slight but perceptible downward trend in labour’s share of GDP and an equally slight but perceptible upward trend in capital’s share. The downward trend for wages as a share of GDP is particularly pronounced from the 70s until the mid-90s (say around 1997), after which labour’s share of the pie stabilises.
  • The ITEM club looks at the effect that changes in the share of GDP of imports and indirect taxes have on the shares of labour and capital. What they find is that taxes tend to squeeze labour’s share of the economy, not capital’s.
  • Globalisation, together with rising commodity prices and competition in international labour and product markets, is likely to further squeeze labour’s share of the pie.
  • Finally, “the recovery when it comes will benefit capital more than labour.” This will, of course, further exacerbate already high levels of inequality in the UK.

Overall, the ITEM club report makes for very interesting reading and acknowledges that we will continue to face economic challenges over the short to medium term. The most important conclusion I draw from the report is this: If the government suddenly decides to change what the Bank of England is targeting in its efforts to manage inflation, and particularly to “exclude factors beyond our control”, remember what this means. Remember that “targeting domestically generated inflation” is code for “keeping wages down”.

[Elsewhere] Scotland – Just Imagine

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A referendum on Scottish independence should be a constitutional impossibility. After all, one of the reasons behind choosing the Additional Member System for elections to the Scottish Parliament was to deny any single party (and, one suspects, the SNP in particular) a majority. Yet some time between March and May this year, something spectacular happened.
Read more over at Scottish Times.

[Elsewhere] The Conservatives on Europe: A Dictionary

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This entry was originally published over at HuffPo UK on Monday October 24th, 2011.

Parliament today is debating Britain’s membership in the EU, following an online petition signed by over 100,000 people. Clearly, with the economy having ground to a halt, unemployment at a historic high, and the Eurozone in crisis, we have nothing better to do than navel-gaze, expose divisions within one of the governing parties, and thereby create further economic and political uncertainty. What strikes me in all this are some of the spectacular rhetorical feats of Conservative politicians when it comes to Europe. I have prepared a brief dictionary.

Bernard Jenkin MP: “It’s about growth. The economy is not growing, and one of the reasons why the economy is not growing is … a business survey showed that over £60 billions per year of burden of EU regulation rests on our economy now. (…) We used to have well below the average of youth unemployment, we’re now on the average and youth unemployment is growing.”

Translation: “I need someone to blame for this mess, and the ‘previous government’s legacy’ line doesn’t quite wash anymore. Who else is around? Ah, the EU! Quick, let’s make up some numbers!”

Here are some questions I would like to ask of the Member for Harwich and North Essex:

  • If the EU is the major reason why the UK economy is not growing, then how come the economy was able to grow in previous periods despite EU membership? How are other member states’ economies growing?
  • Similarly for youth unemployment, how come Germany has the lowest unemployment rate since re-unification, if it is the EU that is stopping our kids from being able to get a job? How come this staggering rise in youth unemployment coincides with government cuts in investment in skills and education for our youth, such as the increase of tuition fees and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance?
  • What alternatives to EU membership is Mr Jenkin proposing? What impact does he believe they would have on Britain’s trade with the EU and the British economy as a whole? How would they reduce this enormous “regulatory burden” he is speaking of?

There’s the rub: if Britain wishes to continue trading with the largest single market on the planet, it is going to have to take the regulations that go with that. Surely, it is better to have a seat at the table when it comes to creating those regulations. And while we’re making up numbers, the EU has some of its very own. Unsurprisingly, they show an increase in GDP and jobs directly attributable to the Single Market, and an appreciable decrease in “red tape”.

Everyone: “Renegotiate our terms of EU membership!”

This can be neatly translated as “We want a pick-and-mix Europe. We will play nicely when it suits us and when we’re directly benefiting from our membership but will refuse to lift a finger to actually contribute to the community.”
Economists have a word for this kind of behaviour: it’s called “free-riding”; see also “tragedy of the commons”. There is a fatal flaw with this kind of thinking and it’s this: if the UK “renegotiates the terms”, other countries will either not allow that or want much the same thing for themselves. After all, if the UK can reap the rewards of membership without fully contributing, why shouldn’t everyone else? You can see where this is heading. If no one wants to contribute, if everyone only cherry-picks the best bits for themselves, sooner rather than later there’ll be no community left, and no benefits for anyone to pick.

William Hague MP: “There can be very small, narrow treaty changes, there can be major treaty changes. (…) I do not believe that it is in every instance (…) that you need to have referendum.”

This is of course code for “We will give you a referendum when it’s in our interest and we think we can get the outcome we want from it.”

Ultimately this raises the question of whether referenda are a meaningful way to decide on complex constitutional issues such as electoral reform or EU membership. My experience from the recent AV referendum would suggest that they are useful only under certain conditions, which are unlikely to be present if and when it comes to a referendum on the nature of Britain’s EU membership or future treaty changes. Referendum campaigns – especially ones which happen under time pressure, as any campaign on a treaty change would – tend to boil down extremely complex issue into five-word slogans. “Small change, big difference” and “She needs a maternity unit, not an Alternative Voting system”, some of the key slogans from both sides of the AV campaign, are patronising, overly simplistic, lacking in substance. Now imagine having to reduce something like the Lisbon Treaty into a slogan. Far from increasing the level and quality of political debate, referenda like the one on AV or any we are likely to get on the European Union have a tendency to shut debate down. Only if political discourse can develop naturally, over and appropriate time span which allows for issues to be explored in depth – like for instance in the proposed Scottish independence referendum – are referenda a truly meaningful way of making political choices. So in some ways, this whole debate is a huge red herring.

William Hague MP: “…the return of other powers to the United Kingdom, particularly in the field of social and employment laws, things like the Working Time Directive, things of that kind.”

Read: “Rights for workers? What is this EU nonsense? You must be joking!”

It always strikes me how the first (and as far as I can tell only) area of community competency that William Hague wants to repatriate is to do with social justice, equality, and protecting workers. He’s been singing that particular song ever since he was Tory leader and came to speak at my school in Vienna about Britain’s awkward relationship with the EU. Let’s have a quick look at the much-maligned Working Time Directive, for instance. These are some of the things it regulates:

  • It makes it a right to not have to work more than 48 hours in a week. Given that UK workers give their employers £29 billion of free overtime every year, this kind of limit seems sensible to me.
  • It stipulates that you should get at least 11 hours’ rest in every 24-hour period. Doctors, therefore, don’t get to pull 36-hour shifts anymore. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be treated by a doctor who isn’t about to collapse from exhaustion.
  • It says that you should be allowed break at work. These can help prevent anything from deterioration of your eye sight and RSI to major injuries and fatalities. They also reduce stress. So the NHS doesn’t need to spend money on treating these conditions. Sounds like a good deal to me.
  • It regulates the amount of night work you can do, and the conditions under which you can do it. See prevention of health problems, and which doctor would you prefer to be treated by, above.
  • It also says that you are entitled to a minimum number of days of annual leave. And while this can be inconvenient when you discover in August that you still have 20 days to take before Christmas, it also allows you to switch off and recover occasionally, further contributing to prevention of stress and other conditions.

If this is William Hague’s main bone of contention with the EU, then I know what side I stand on. And if you are an employee of any kind – salaried, agency worker, occasional – then so should you.

The Europe debate is of course one that is never far from the surface on this sceptered isle. Yet bringing all this to the fore right now, as the EU and the Eurozone struggle to find the political will to overcome a huge crisis, and as it becomes increasingly apparent that the UK economy itself will need some sort of intervention to get moving again seems a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Mind you, it’s entertaining enough.

Sue

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I have just nominated Sue Marsh (@suey2y) to be a torchbearer at the London Paralympic Games in 2012. When I first heard that LOCOG were looking for “people who have made a difference in their community and inspired or supported disabled people”, Sue was the first person who came to mind.
I first found Sue the way I find anything these days: on Twitter. Somebody linked to one of her blog posts, I can’t remember which. I found her writing sensitive, eloquent, thought-provoking. I followed her. A few months later, I helped her out with some research on disability benefits in Germany (short version: some things are better, some things are worse). Through Twitter, we have stayed in touch, and while I don’t read her blog religiously, chances are that if I see a link from her in my timeline I will click on it.
Sue suffers from a rare form of Crohn’s disease, a debilitating illness which can leave her incapable to move or eat, vomiting for hours, in unbearable pain for days. Strong painkillers take a lot of her energy but help her manage the pain; surgery can provide temporary relief – until it gets worse again.
Over the past 18 months, as budget cuts have begun to hit the most vulnerable, as the disabled have been demonised as “benefit scroungers”, as people on death’s door have been declared “fit for work”, Sue has been at the centre of The Broken of Britain campaign fighting for disabled rights. Her writing has touched thousands of disabled people, raised awareness of disability issues among those of us lucky enough to be able-bodied, and serves as a constant reminder of the importance of solidarity.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned from Sue and the Broken of Britain is about the sheer diversity when it comes to disability. Our iconography for disabled people focuses on what we can see. A person in a wheelchair, a blind person with a white cane – these are the traditional symbols of the disabled in our society. Yet disability comes in so many more varieties than that, some visible and some not. Vision and hearing impairments, mobility issues, those are the forms of disability that we can easily identify. Chronic conditions like MS, CFS or Crohn’s disease are just as debilitating, but they don’t fit into our mental model of disability. One day a person is fine, the next they cannot move, and the day after they are fine again. Our brains seem to have a binary switch – your body either works or doesn’t; we find it hard to make allowances for variable conditions, bodies which work some of the time, unreliably. We find it even harder to deal with mental health conditions, which can be just as debilitating. Just because a person doesn’t conform to our expectations of disability does not mean that they are “faking it”, “scrounging”, or even “fit for work”.
Another lesson I have learned from Sue is how close you and I – the average able-bodied people – are to the precipice of disability. An accident that puts us in a wheelchair may be just around the corner. I may feel fine today, but that means nothing when it comes to what nightmare condition my body may develop tomorrow. Every day you live as an able-bodied person is a day you’ve been lucky and a day you should be thankful for. If simple humanity isn’t enough to make us want to care for the vulnerable in our society, to show solidarity and help people in need, then this awareness of our own fragility and mortality at least should point us in the right direction.
A final lesson: this one from Sue, Chris Grayling and the Paralympic Games. Odd combination, I know. It was Chris Grayling who said (Q286) to the Work and Pensions Committee earlier this year that with the proposed welfare and benefits reforms he was trying to address a situation where “a Paralympic athlete with a university degree has no obligation to look for a job”. This is, of course, cheap and lazy rhetoric. Yes, Britain has world class Paralympic athletes. Yes, they are incredibly inspiring, both to disabled people and to the able-bodied. Yet equating all “deserving” disabled people with Paralympic athletes in the public’s mind – which is precisely what Chris Grayling sought to do with his remarks – is deliberately deceptive. It ignores the diversity of conditions which can cause disability, denies disabled people their individuality, implies that those who are not breaking world records on a daily basis are somehow worth less. On the other hand, one of the weird and wonderful things about competitive sports for the disabled is the sheer complexity of the rules: because everyone’s condition is different, you have to find a way to more or less compare like with like. Unlike Chris Grayling, this system allows disabled to people to compete on a level playing field. We as a society, too, should be able to allow for that. We should treat the disabled with dignity and respect, as individuals, and give them the support they need to have a meaningful and fulfilling life as part of our society.
So when we watch the Paralympic Games next year, let’s celebrate the amazing achievements on the athletes – and let’s at the same time remember all those other disabled people out there. Each of them, in their own unique way, tries their best every day – to get through the day, to contribute to society, to achieve something amazing.

[Elsewhere] What have immigrants ever done for us?

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This article was originally published on Huffington Post UK.
Apart from a ten-line blip in a seven-page speech David Cameron made back in April, whenever immigration comes up in the news in this country it is in a negative context. Ed Balls says Labour let too many of the likes of me in, and Theresa May seems to think that the country is overrun by evil immigrant cats – or something like that. Yet every day, millions of immigrants work hard, pay our taxes and try to contribute to the British economy and society as best we can – much like everyone else in the country. Here are some examples of what immigrants do for this country.
Work hard
The lady who cleans my house every couple of weeks is Bulgarian and works for an agency where the majority of the staff are from my native country too. This is not because of some Great Immigrant Conspiracy; but when I was looking for a cleaner I left voicemails for about five different companies, and by the time I got to this one I was so fed up I didn’t even bother. Five minutes later my phone rang: “We’re sorry we missed your call, madam. How can we help?” It was only when the proprietor turned up at my house to assess it that we found out we were from the same country.
My cleaner works hard. Sometimes she gets in at 7.30 in the morning, before I’ve left for work, and sometimes she leaves my house at 6pm and goes to yet another client. She puts up with all my idiosyncrasies, the constant mess that is my house thanks to my full-time job and numerous extracurricular activities, the occasional last-minute request for her to rearrange her entire schedule and please come back later. On top of that, most of the staff at the agency are doing NVQ qualifications in order to improve the service they give customers.
My cleaner and her colleagues are not the only ones who work hard. Claudia is from Germany. She works with autistic people. Michelle is American. She works as a producer and project manager for performance artists. Currently she is working on a project involving the performance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in various languages, including Sign. The nuclear physics group of a certain Scottish university is made up of 15 people of ten different nationalities. Immigrants can be found in every profession and walk of life, working hard to contribute to the economy and make a better life for themselves and their families.
Play hard
Sometimes even when we play, we work. When my Scottish friend Morna put out a call on Twitter earlier this year for developers, marketers and media professionals to help her start up her business using the unique “Sweatshop” method, I am not sure what she expected. What she got was a motley crew of 30 or so passionate professionals. While there were sizable English and Scottish contingents among us, immigrants were disproportionately represented. About a third of the Founders’ Team came from all over the world: Slovenia, Poland, Italy, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Denmark. In exchange for free food and lodgings and a small number of shares in the start-up, we travelled to Dundee and put three weekends’ worth of hard graft into bootstrapping a business from nothing. We didn’t do it for the money, nor for the glory. We did it because it was fun and because we believed in the project: a social platform with the potential to revolutionise adult and higher education in this country.
The FlockEdu crowd aren’t the only ones combining work and play. Kathryn, who is Canadian, uses her skills as a musician and composer to run her local church choir. Iman, a writer of Pakistani origin who grew up in Saudi Arabia, donates her time and skills to various campaigning groups and political publications. Even in something as British as the recent referendum on the voting system, we had a fair number of immigrants doing their bit to improve democratic representation for UK citizens.
Care in the community
It often strikes me how disproportionately engaged immigrants are in the communities I’m involved with. At the Star & Shadow, a small, entirely volunteer-run cinema and arts space in Newcastle where I occasionally help out, people from all over the world are at the heart of the community, side by side with our British friends. Stephanie from France runs great seasons of foreign films or cult British television sci-fi. Yaron from Israel puts on gigs with the most weird and wonderful local bands, giving them a much-needed opportunity for exposure. Cathy from China pulls pints like a pro behind the Star & Shadow bar.
Edinburgh, too, has its own volunteer-run arts space. After the bankruptcy of their landlord, the Forest Café is currently on hiatus while trying to raise enough money to buy the building they have called their home for over a decade. Yet you only need to listen to the voices in their fundraising video to understand the passion of all their volunteers and the important contribution immigrants make to the project.
I spoke to Margarida, a 23-year-old Portuguese woman who is a Volunteer Coordinator and member of the Forest Action Team. For her, the Forest is a home and a family. Even after her European Volunteer Service funding ran out, Margarida chose to stay in Edinburgh.

“I couldn’t leave the Forest behind in such a crucial moment. Right now, the Forest needs everyone and I’m here to help bring the Forest back with everything I have to give, be it time, energy, creativity.”

She wants to make sure that the Forest lives and continues to provide a unique and amazing space and service to everyone in Edinburgh. At the same time, she is making new friends, learning new skills, developing projects old and new. Margarida finds Edinburgh as a city and the Forest as a community warm and welcoming – only the British press with its persistently negative coverage of immigration worries her; though, she adds cynically, it doesn’t surprise her.
Not only arts spaces but also charities which provide vital services often benefit from the contribution of immigrant volunteers. Mara, from the US, runs the Abortion Support Network – the only charity which provides practical help and funds to women from Northern and Southern Ireland who need to travel to England for an abortion. She and her small volunteer team provide a non-judgmental listening service, factual and impartial information, and much-needed funds and accommodation for women who otherwise would not be able to access safe and legal abortions. Immigrant volunteers are at the heart of the “Big Society”.
An experience many of us immigrants have in common is a kind of multiple personality disorder we observe in the country we have chosen to make our home. One on one, as individuals, we are welcomed by our British friends. We find communities we can contribute to and integrate in. We find people who reach out a helping hand, like the English Language Conversation Group at the Star & Shadow. We find our contributions valued. When, however, it comes to political gain and newspaper circulations, things turn quickly to an “us and them” mentality which is healthy for no one.
Recognising immigrants’ contributions to this country is the first step towards recognising how much we all have to learn from each other – and how much we can all gain from truly being “in this together”.