2013-05-19T18:09:25-04:00 Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=roifield-brown Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Roifield Brown Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1192578 2012-01-08T13:27:15-05:00 2012-03-09T05:12:01-05:00

Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roifield-brown/
Make no mistake when the Jamaican football team met the Queen after the World Cup in 1998, it was special and when Lizzie comes to Jamaica and is routinely given a big plate of ackee and salt fish as the Queen of Jamaica it is a point of national pride. But now it's time to say "likkle more" to monarchy 1.0, and usher in Red Stripe royalty 2.0.

I've got a radical proposal, hear me out. Let's kick out Mrs Windsor and replace her with a Jamaican monarch. A true bonafide Yard King or Queen! Let's not have an aristocracy and all that nonsense, but elect the head of state and call them the King or Queen of Jamaica and allow them ceremonial rule over Jamrock. It would be a PR masterstroke of international proportions.

Imagine Obama coming to meet the King of Jamaica, the pride Jamaica would feel having the King or Queen turn up at the Olympics to watch Usian Bolt shatter another record and the Jamaica track team capture another bucketload of medals!

Who wants another republic in the world? The title president of Jamaica has little cache and does not make the heart sore with pride. Do I want to see the swearing in of the first president of Jamaica or the bashment party of its first "real" dancehall Queen or King? I know which I would want to attend.

Presidents in the Americas are 10 a penny, let Jamaica be the only country in the hemisphere with its own crowned head. Constitutionally it would be simple to do. Get rid of the Governor General, who is the ceremonial representative of Queen Beth and put in place the new authentic home-grown "yard" crowned head in his place.

Get the senate to elect the monarch, as Poland used to do in the middle ages, as Jamaica's upper house does little enough as it is. The criteria for selection: someone who is above politics, not affiliated to any political party, with a history of public service and above all a national treasure. Another test would be that they are suitably middle aged, so they would only be around for 20-30 years or so tops. His or her partner would be the Queen or King consort but there would be no more honours for their family as this would be a meritocratic monarchy.

When Queen Winsome or King Lenford pops their clogs, elect another one, simple. It's not right that Europeans, Asians and Africans have the market covered when it comes to royalty, let the Caribbean in on the act too, but do it with a West Indian twist.

I say the time has come for a unique reggae reggae royalty, tell me, me wrong den nuh?

My mate @StephenDGH on twitter "Great pity King Tubby is not around to take the job!"]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1186904 2012-01-05T14:54:57-05:00 2012-03-06T05:12:01-05:00

Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roifield-brown/ Daily Mail's headlines and feel I should take an opposing view to whatever George Osborne says is the right course for Britain. I'm by instinct sympathetic to the "muesli eating, do-gooding Guardian editorials" and think that blogger Sunny Hundal is a sage, whose opinions are incontrovertible fact that needs no investigation. While Peter Oborne's editorials in the Telegraph deserve no time as they have absolutely no merit.

The stunning and powerful headline "Murders" in the Daily Mail, was testament to the power of the expected saying the unexpected. Only the Daily Mail and probably the Sun could have run that headline, one that made middle Britain sit up and take notice of institutional racism. The effects of racial disadvantage were not an issue for most Britons, so speaking in that manner to its core constituency was a post war British game changer. That headline said that Black people were British in a way that would not have had the same resonance or readership coming from say the Independent. I'm grateful that this right of centre newspaper had the guts and foresight to run that headline regardless of whether Mr Lawrence had once painted the editor's house or not. It was a ballsy move that helped change British opinion when it comes to race and race relations.

The powerful sentiments from across the political and social divide expressed after the life sentences handed down on Stephens Lawrence's killers was an all too rare occurrence in Britain. It was something that all right minded people could agree with and get behind. There are precious few of these moments, it's one of the few upsides from this grisly and heinous murder. However less than 24 hours later, we are back to knee jerk responses:" I'll defend or I'll blindly attack" mode with this Diane Abbott brouhaha over race. It's hard not to wish that the response to Stephen Lawrence's murder had been as quick as it was to that tweet, but Stephen was murdered in 1993 a life time ago (according to criminal sentences), Britain is in part at least a different society.

Wind the clock back a few weeks and be honest did anyone really think Jeremy Clarkson wanted public service strikers shot? No, it was a joke. Depending on where you stand politically it was either a good one or an ill judged one, but a joke it was. However, the usual suspects on the left jumped up and down and claimed that he should be sacked from the BBC for making the kind of comments that we expect from him and that it's his job to make, as a professional right wing caricature. Today the self-same people in the most part can be found defending Dianne Abbott after her tweetmare, while those decrying PC madness in regards to Clarkson's comments are using the same rule against the MP for Hackney , a neat and defying act of political gymnastics.

Do people on the right really believe that she thinks that all ''White people love playing 'divide & rule"? I don't think so, though maybe I'm naïve. I'm inclined to believe that her tweet was taken out of context. 140 characters is a restrictive format and encourages people to make complex points in a simplistic manner, moreover, the nature of Twitter which leads to one on one discussions taking place in a public arena, blurring the boundaries between a public reputation and private exchanges inevitably results in individuals being pilloried as they express themselves in this way. But for the "I want to be outraged brigade" on the right, that tweet serves to demonise and it's fun to call a hypocrite and racist someone who they instinctively dismiss for her political stance on the very same issues. Challenge views we don't understand or disagree with, yes but do it without vitriolic censure.

I'm not going to win many friends with my next line but I think that 'most' people and politicians on the right and left are decent people, not out on the take and inherently corrupt or stupid, but like me prone to instant reactions when mostly reflection before thinking and speaking is apt. Yes I think David Cameron is a toff, who comes from a class of people who think that it is a their divine place to rule and to guide Britain, but I also think that he seems like a nice enough bloke who probably has the country's best interests at heart. When you boil it down this will not be too different from mine, though we look at the issues in a different way because of our very dissimilar upbringings. Some of my best friends are Tories.

I like Alan Hanson, he looks like Captain Scarlett and knows a lot about football, but anyone excusing his silly 'coloured' slip the other day should do the same for Diane Abbott and her 'white people' gaffe. Let us call the real racists, racists and the real idiots the idiots that they are. I for one don't think we should pillory people and instantly demand that they lose their livelihoods over a slip between mic and lip. Let's all just get on with the really important things in life, oppose real injustice, engage in constructive debate and give the benefit of the doubt before we condemn in an instant.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1165424 2011-12-22T11:53:57-05:00 2012-02-21T05:12:02-05:00

Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roifield-brown/
In his quiet and unconfrontational manner he has been true to his campaign promise, but this approach without soaring rhetoric or at least a reassuring arm around America has left many, as quoted by matt Damon, to "no longer hope for audacity". Progressives, liberals and independents have felt bereft of a leader that will stiffen the sinews and take the fight to the bellicose right. Maybe with the small upswing from the economy, the latest jobless figures are 8.6% and confidence is returning, things are playing into his hands just at the right time. Probably the smartest move of his first term, was not to polarise and let a Republican party in throes to hard right and the tea party do that for him and in the process re-elect him.

Possibly the strategy of talking softly, trying to compromise and being "nice", which many have taken for weakness and inept leadership is the kind of Presidential retail politics that will win in 2012. Maybe his smile and mild manners can at least weaken the Republicans in Congress who seem hell bent on opposing any bill that smells of compromise. Senator John McCain says Congress' latest failure to reach agreement on legislation extending the payroll tax cut for working Americans "hurts the Republican Party." Obamas 2008 election opponent goes on to comment that his party made a mistake in voting down the Senate-passed version of a bill that would have kept the current payroll tax relief for at least two more months. In this he is in good company the Wall Street Journal and Newt Gingrich amongst others have lined up to condemn the brinksmanship and obstructionism of house Republicans in making deals that seem only to be in the short term interests of the Tea Party base and radio talk show hosts. They seem to want to brag that they have been true to their convictions as the machinery of government grinds to a halt.

Looking back at the period before the debt ceiling debate in August may well prove to be the high water mark of this shouty, my way or the highway, tail wagging the dog republican strategy of conducting politics. With many Tea Partyers pushing for the US credit rating to be downgraded, many moderate republicans were aghast that they would risk Government default and world financial chaos for purely ideological reasons. If moderate Republicans could not understand that, well neither could Democrats or Independents. It was after that bloody episode that the President's poll numbers started to inch north. He was seen as a captive to the reckless right and he labelled the Congress as a do nothing body, echoing Harry Truman, this chimed with the American people as Congress scored record low approval numbers of 11%.

So is Obama a certainty for 2012? Not yet. The economy can still play a decisive part, if things get very much worse. Maybe he can smile his way through until the end of January when the Republican nominee he will probably face will be known, but after that he will have to energise voters to engage with him, not just like him. The main points of his re-election stump as becoming clear though . "I'm the president that saved America from the second depression; look at my foreign record and look at the alternative", will be the main planks of his argument for another four year term." Whether this will inspire like his message of hope in 2008, I doubt but the Republicans will only have themselves to blame if he has to nothing more than this to win.

So can Obama smile his way to November with the political tides flowing his way?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1148489 2011-12-14T19:00:00-05:00 2012-02-13T05:12:01-05:00

Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roifield-brown/ X factor, the SNP and this summer's riots have in common? It's that they force the English to look at themselves and to point to a new English identity that is not in any part British. Whatever the causes for the lawlessness that swept Birmingham, London, Manchester and a clutch of other cities in the summer, these events did not happen in Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland, and like a cast of singers on X Factor its participants were nether wholly black or white.

Watching the X Factor reveals an England that is white, black and brown, an England that is very different from it's Celtic cousins. Whether it is Misha B, JLS or half the members of Little Mix, the ethnic minorities it depicts always speak with English accents, they are Brummies, Cockneys and Scousers. Yes there are a few non-white famous Brits like Hardeep Singh Koli and Shirley Bassey but they are the exceptions to the rule, Britons with black or brown skins are nearly always English.

The 2001 UK census bares out the fact that 97% of the non-whites in Britain live in England, so calling them Black British, or British Asian is wrong. The non-whites in the British Isles are an English phenomena. England since 1948 has radically changed on the ground and racially, is markedly different from any other constituent part of the UK, not just in terms of its size but its economic and cultural power. The fastest growing ethnic group category in England in 2011 is that encompassing mixed race individuals.

If Scottish devolution ends with independence, whether the English like it or not the often confusing notion of where British and English identity starts and finishes will be consigned to history. This forging of a new English identity has already been noted by people across the political spectrum from The English Defence League on the right to Billy Bragg on the left. The EDL incorporates a Jewish and a Sikh division and now many English socialists argue that patriotism is not just the preserve of the old right wing.

From the days of the Angles and Saxons, the English have a been a polyglot people, an alliance. Athelstan the first King of the English, ruled over a nation divided between the English and more recent immigrants, who had come initially to take English wealth, jobs and women but who did not go home, the Vikings. Over the next 1100 years, waves of immigration into the British Isles has nearly always been an English affair. The Normans came to rule over the English, the Huguenots came to London, Jews fleeing from persecution in Eastern Europe came to the East End and when the British Empire called for workers to help with the reconstruction of Britain after World War II, they for the most part settled in London, Luton, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, Leicester, Lancashire mill towns and Liverpool.

What has always marked the English out has been this shifting sense of who they are. The Scots, Welsh and Irish have always been able to point to the fact, that there were here first. For the English, it was never really a question of blood, of being pure, because they never have been. What David Starkey missed in his ''the whites have become black'' theory, espoused in a recent Newsnight discussion on the riots, was the historic inventiveness of the English to assimilate cultures that it has come into contact with and to make them English.

Take fried and battered fish from the Jewish immigrants in the 19th century that in a generation became the traditional English dish of fish and chips. The same can be said of chicken tikka massala, or the new mutated Jamaican-Cockney dialect of some inner city English Londoners. What it is to be English is a moving goal post unlike say Ulster Protestantism.

Of course to say that this constant rewriting of English identity has been a seamless process without hiccups, bloodshed and violent reaction would be an understatement but it is the defining characteristic of the last thousand years, more powerful than Empire, the industrial Revolution or the Reformation.

The irony could well be that as England retreats from a multinational state it becomes Europe's first multi-ethnic state that embraces at its heart the notion of identity based on an abstract ideal that is inclusive not exclusive. Multi-racial Britain never really existed, it was always a multi-racial, multi-ethnic England, and has been a defining feature of this green and pleasant land.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1125046 2011-12-02T06:07:10-05:00 2012-02-01T05:12:01-05:00

Roifield Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roifield-brown/
The last time the world entered a period where banks and nations went bust, there were three choices, Communism, more of the same or Fascism. In the 1930's you had, black and white with a little grey inbetween. Leaders offered not only hope, certainty and hate but also vision. They said things could and would get better. In mainland Europe the way to reinvigorate the economy was to build armaments and autobahns and to hate your neighbours, to build walls around your boarders, economy and your mind. This lead to gas chambers and world war. There was another vision, FDR dragged America from the brink of revolution with a concept of American expectionalism, that his nation could conquer its fears and its wild hinterland, that Americans could bring water to the desert, that ideas and its sweat could fertilise barren land. In the 30's leaders led.

Now with a failed Super Congressional committee, political deadlock in Greece, record levels of youth unemployment across Europe and with riot police pepper spraying college kids peacefully demonstrating, where is the vision to join the dots and explain the times? No political party the world over has a way out of the current morass and no one is willing or able to articulate a path back from worldwide economic stagnation. The best we have is pain now, probably tomorrow and for the immediate future. All strata of mainstream political thought seems to agree: lets pay bond holders not to foreclose on nation states, then get those nations to slash public services to pay the bond holders. Is there no other alternative? Japan entered a asset price bubble recession in 1991, similar to the 2008 crash, it's still mired in stagnation 20 years later. Our political elite has never looked so threadbare as today and in hock to money markets and speculators.

The situation for the right, whether it is The Republicans, The Conservatives in the UK or Christian Democrats across Europe is, either ignore the underlying issues of depression, stagnation and wealth inequality or to tinker around the edges. The Republicans running for the White House have gone for option one. "Get yourself a job" Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich shout. There must be 9 million jobs in the US somewhere doing a very good job of hiding themselves from all and sundry. In the UK Cameron has taken on the guise of a social liberal, "I'm for gay marriage", "I know there is an issue with Youth unemployment". But these attitudes mask any real substantive ideas or change, the autumn statement underlined that.

The position of the left is more worrying. If you can't make a coherent case for economic change when the bond markets are pushing up the interest rates on nation states to the point of bankruptcy, youth unemployment is rising throughout the Western world and governments have bailed out banks, it may be time to admit that the politicians of the left lack are ideology vacant. Or that the time is up for left of centre politics from Arizona to Australia.

The Occupy movements around the world have proved that there is deep mistrust of the economic status quo, they are a neat parallel to the Jarrow marches and the Hoovervilles of seventy years ago. With no elected leaders and without pointed prescriptions these movements have not only sprung up and weathered rain, ridicule and riot police but have done this with no left of centre party able to nail its colours to the cause and frame a set of polices to address their concerns.

The logical conclusion of the impotence of progressive policy makers is creating a vacuum in the political spectrum around the globe. This situation is almost Fukiyama-like, an "End of Politics". There is no left, no framing of a counter vision or set of ideas that people can rally to in the current crisis. The alignment of left and right, of western politics that started with the French revolution may well be over, now the only question is how reactionary are your policies? We are entering a world where only wealth matters and governments are headed by unelected officials and millionaires hell bent on managing the interests of the few and hoping that the many do not notice. Anyone for cake? Its 1789.]]>