Food for Thoughts on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)

Holidays are a time for relaxation. That goes mainly for the body, though, not so much for the mind. I believe that the mind must always be stimulated and today's contribution is evidence of that.



"A Day Without Immigrants": would you be able to get through it?

One of my favourite columnists in the UK is the current political director of the Huffington Post UK, Mehdi Hasan (left). Even when I disagree with some of his views, I can still appreciate the thinking behind his argument. The piece below appeared first in the New Statesman, a publication of which Mehdi is a contributing writer. For obvious reasons Hasan's article speaks volumes to me, an immigrant who has worked for ten years now in local regeneration, art, community and education projects. It's ironic that this post, which I copied and pasted here from The New Statesman's website weeks ago, will appear at a time when the current Cameron-led government is in the middle of a backlash on account of its recent controversial and (frankly!) racist propaganda against immigrants (if you live in the UK, you've probably heard of the "Go Home" vans).

I have not  sought permission for publication of this article and all credit goes to Mehdi and the New Statesman. I will, however, take credit for selecting the music. It is absolutely beautiful. Enjoy.

I have a modest proposal for the likes of Ukip, MigrationWatch, the Home Secretary, David Goodhart, Paul Dacre and, of course, the BNP. Why not call for “A Day Without Immigrants?” Wouldn’t that demonstrate, once and for all, that neither our economy nor our society needs migrants? That they are a burden, rather than a blessing?

“A Day Without Immigrants” was the name given to a rather innovative series of protests in the US in 2006, which brought more than a million Latinos on to the streets of 50 cities, from New York to Los Angeles. They boycotted shops, schools and their places of work to try to highlight the plight of undocumented migrant workers.

But here’s how I’d implement a similar boycott here: anyone in the UK born abroad or with a parent born abroad would stay at home for 24 hours. Any business or organisation founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant would close for the day.

Britain would be transformed – but, regrettably for the immigration-bashers, in a wholly negative way. In fact, I suspect it would be a pretty awful 24 hours for most Britons, dark and dystopian, even. Think Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later – but without migrants, rather than with zombies.

Let’s start with the trivial stuff. Who would serve you in restaurants or coffee shops? Who would make your sandwiches and wraps at lunchtime? What would be the point of going out to eat in the evening if there were no longer any Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Lebanese, Persian, Italian, Spanish and, yes, French restaurants open?

How about your health? Who’d patch you up and prescribe your medicines? Ministers and their outriders in the right-wing press like to scaremonger about the spiralling costs of so-called health tourism (which amounts to a shocking 0.01 per cent of the £109bn NHS budget) and exaggerate the numbers of migrant families that turn up expecting free treatment in our overstretched A&E departments. The reality, as the chair of the council of the Royal College of GPs, Dr Clare Gerada, has pointed out, is that “you are much more likely to have an immigrant caring for you than sitting up in front of the emergency department”. About 30 per cent of the doctors and 40 per cent of the nurses working in the health service were born abroad. Put simply, the NHS could not survive 24 hours without its migrant workforce.

The same applies to the social-care sector. If you have a sick parent living in a care home, you might have to take the day off to look after them. In 2009 a fifth of all care assistants and home carers – 135,000 people in total – were foreign-born; in London, 60 per cent of care workers were migrants. Speaking of taking the day off, neither the Deputy Prime Minister nor the leader of the opposition would have to turn up to Westminster for PMQs – Nick Clegg is the son of a Dutch mother and half-Russian father; Ed Miliband is the child of Polish refugees.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor would have to go to the Commons to warn that “A Day Without Immigrants” would, if extended over a year, force him to introduce a further £7bn of spending cuts and/or tax rises. Why? Migrants boost the British economy by £7bn a year, according to an OECD study published in June. That’s the equivalent of an extra 2p on the basic rate of income tax.

Sticking with the economy, we’d have to board up iconic British stores such as Marks & Spencer (co-founder: Michael Marks of Belarus), Selfridges (founder: the American Harry Gordon Selfridge) and Tesco (founder: Jacob Kohen, son of Avram, a Polish migrant). UK holidaymakers would have to cancel their cheap flights on easyJet (founder: the Greekborn Stelios Haji-Ioannou).

Our universities, a multibillion-pound export industry, would take a hit, too, if foreign students stayed away. One in ten students in British universities comes from outside the EU and the fees that students from other countries pay are a bigger source of income for most universities than research grants.

What about sport? Imagine going to watch a Premier League game midweek as a Liverpool fan. Luis Suárez wouldn’t be playing. If you’re a Man United fan, you’d miss out on the ball skills of Robin van Persie; if you’re a Man City fan, it’d be Yaya Touré on strike. Chelsea fans? Say goodbye to Juan Mata and Eden Hazard.

Incidentally, if you were planning on using the Tube to go to watch Chelsea play, you’d find it in a pretty filthy state, the train platforms tagged with graffiti and strewn with rubbish: 95 per cent of London Underground cleaning staff are foreign-born. It wouldn’t just be the District Line that was dirty, it would also be your place of work: 89 per cent of office cleaners in the capital are migrants.

But the countryside would be fine, right? Wrong. Imagine all those unpicked crops and the effect: the rise in food prices, supermarkets opting for (cheaper) foreign over domestic produce, fruit farmers on their knees. The truth is that “native” Brits have not been interested in fruit-picking for years and, as the Home Office’s own Migration Advisory Committee warned in May, many of the UK’s fruit-picking businesses could close without new migrant workers from outside the EU.

On immigration, we hear constantly that voters don’t trust the official statistics or studies (a recent Ipsos MORI poll found that the public thinks that immigrants make up 31 per cent of the population –when the official figure is 13 per cent). So this may be the only way to win hearts and minds. A great boycott. A one-day strike by immigrants and their children across the UK, coupled with a ban on the use of immigrant-founded businesses by the “indigenous” population.

For a mere 24 hours. Let’s do it. And if it doesn’t transform public opinion, well, at least I’ll have had the day off work.

Next Post: "Humour and Music on a Summer Sunday Morning", to be published on Sunday 18th August at 10am (GMT)

My Highlights of 2011

As another year comes to an end, I would like to bring to the attention of my readers and fellow bloggers the books, films, music and dance pieces that made me go "Wow!" in the last twelve months. Difficult task it is, though, as I was exposed to so much quality in 2011. I hope you enjoy my selections. Happy New Year everybody!

Books:

Andrea Levy's The Long Song is one of those novels that manages to be both entertaining and clever, rooting the story it tells on so many facts that at times it feels like a documentary. Whether as part of your (expanding) bookshelf, or as a gift for your literature-loving friends, this is a must-read.

Virgilio Piñera's Complete Plays took me down memory lane to a place where I came across my adolescent self face to face once again. What made me fall at that young age for this (supposedly) snobbish, no-nonsense, Cuban intellectual who did not suffer fools gladly, and yet always had a kind word for up-and-coming authors? I don't know but, his love for language, his fearlessness when writing, his endless creativity and the fact that he exuded Cubanness whenever he put pen to paper, are elements that must have contributed to that.

A lot has been said about James Joyce's Ulysses. It's the novel that everyone talks about but whose plot people rarely discuss. That's because there's no plot per se. The book centres on one day in the life of both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Above all, for me Ulysses is a very sensorial novel. We not only watch the main characters eating, brawling and (in Bloom's case) engaging in sexual acts, but we feel them, too. In a previous post I questioned Joyce's pole-high position as the pinnacle of modernism. At the time I had not read Ulysses, but now that I have I can tell you all that the hype is justified.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is the type of book I wish it'd been fiction. But no, it's a very real piece of non-fiction. Which makes it the scariest piece I've read for a long time. Naomi carries out a thorough analysis of the economic ideas sponsored by the Chicago School under Milton Friedman's tutelage and traces their links with oppressive regimes across the globe.

Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness was the second book of short stories I bought by the Canadian writer and it like Open Secrets, it didn't disappoint me. She has a way of making the quotidian lives of citizens in and around Ontario extraordinary. But be careful, her fiction is brutal and takes no prisoners.







Music:

This was the year when I managed to have a proper taste of Anoushka Shankar's music. And what a treat it was! The two albums I bought, Breathing Under Water and Traveller have been playing on a loop at home, in the car and on my mp3. Breathing Under Water, where the star sitar-player teams up with percussionist Karsh Kale, is highly lyrical and rooted in Indian classical heritage.

Traveller brings the flamenco tradition back home (it has been widely acknowledged that flamenco has its origins in India) in an organic and fluent way.

The 1956 collaboration between the saxophonist Ben Webster and the piano prodigy Art Tatum, supported by Red Callender on bass and Bill Douglass on drums, was called simply The Legendary: the Album. Such a grandstanding title might attract accusations of hubris, yet each and every single note on the record is pitch perfect. If you like jazz, you must buy this album.

Three records later I consider myself a Concha Buika fan. Her voice should carry a health warning: "Quality on board! Consume carefully". This time around was "La Niña de Fuego" that got me. Concha possesses the type of vocal range that can soar or soothe, depending on its owner's will. Fabulous.

Calima Flamenca was my little surprise this year. They were the wild card about whom I knew very little, mainly through last.fm, and who ended up providing me with two of my favourite tunes of the year from their album Al Calor de la Noche.

Films:

I first saw Missing many years ago and watched it again recently with my wife, courtesy of Lovefilm. Against the backdrop of what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last ten years with British citizens being arrested and tortured abroad, the movie has a prescient feel. Jack Lemmon is mesmerising as the American, law-abiding, conservative father whose son is "disappeared" in an unnamed country in South America (but we all know it's Chile) and who is forced to acknowledge (with a little help from his daughter-in-law Sissy Spacek) the ugly truth about the US involvement in the dictatorships that sprung up in the 60s, 70s and 80s in the region.

There's not much beauty in Biutiful, by the acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. What there is, though, is a hell of a powerful script and a terrific performance by Javier Bardem as the heartless criminal who at the same time is concerned about the wellbeing of the illegal Chinese immigrants he himself exploits. Impartial and raw.

I had some misgivings about watching The King's Speech because of the buzz surrounding it. Plus, 2011 was the year when the monarchy got its mojo back. I, for one, neither Republican nor pro-Crown, didn't want to be a part of it. But The King's Speech is cinema at its best. No gimmicks, or CGI, just a plain, simple story, beautifully acted by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush (Helena Bonham Carter gets a look-in, but hers is a minor role) and capable of awakening feelings of mirth and commiseration.

The Secret in Their Eyes was the type of movie that reminded me of how good Argentinian cinema was. Ricardo Darín plays Benjamín Esposito, a retired legal counsellor, who wants to write a novel in an attempt to close a chapter of his life that remains unsolved. Throw in a psychopath, a dictatorship, a corrupt government official and an unfinished love affair and you have one of the better Latin American movies in recent times.

London River tells the story of Elisabeth (played by Brenda Blethyn) and Ousmane (played by Sotigui Kouyaté) whose offspring are killed in the terrorist attack on 7th July, 2005 in London. What starts as hatred, ignorance and racism is eventually transformed into understanding and sympathy. A movie I would watch again.

Dance:

If with Into the Hoods, Katie Prince and ZooNation conquered the West End of London, with Some Like It Hip Hop she has elevated the urban dance form to new levels. Based loosely on Some Like Hot and Shakespeare's Twelth Night, Some Like It Hip Hop deals with mistaken identity, lost daughters and rulers in crisis. The acting is good, the story believable but the dancing, oh, my, oh, my! The dancing is out of this world. Enough to become my dance highlight of 2011.



What will 2012 have in store for me artistically speaking? I don't know but what I can assure is that the quality will be the same or higher. See you next year!

© 2011


Next Post: “From Here, There and Everywhere…”, to be published on 8th January at 10am (GMT)

While My MP3 Gently Plays

It died but it has yet to be buried. My former Phillips mp3 player stopped dead in its tracks (oh, dear, have I just come up with a superb musical pun? Methinks so) a fortnight ago and had to be replaced straight away. To be honest I still don't know what's wrong with it. The music folder disappeared mysteriously and with it the two-hundred-plus songs I'd put on it. I rushed to the nearest shop and bought a new one, but, it was utter rubbish. Please, take this piece of advice. If you ever come across the brand Archos, in whichever form, run a mile away from it. It's the worst make I've ever encountered. The shop compensated me and gave me a brand new, black 4GB Sony NWZB163 mp3 player. 4 giga is fine with me. It holds approximately between five-hundred and six-hundred tunes and it's perfect for when I'm on the move or out jogging.

"Ich glaube, Janis starb an einer Überdosis Janis." This quote, by Eric 'The Animals' Burdon, was the phrase that set me off on the path to learning German. I wanted to find out why Janis had died of a Janis overdose and the book detailing her life was in German. In years to come someone will probably say "Ich glaube, Amy starb an einer Überdosis Amys."

The first time my wife and I heard Amy Winehouse was on Choice Fm. Straight away we were impressed by her vocal delivery and the lyrics. She had a beautiful Billy Hollidayish rasp, mixed with a more rooted, proper north London nasal twang. It's a pity that her booze'n'drugs lifestyle took its toll in the end. I'd rather remember her as she appeared on Jools Holland about the same time her debut album "Frank" came out. "Stronger than me" is a well-written pop song. I hope you enjoy it.



It's strange that this song is twenty-six years old and yet, it still sounds fresh. Suzanne Vega has such a distinctive timbre and in "Knight Moves" you can see why. She is one of the few singers who knows what to do with her voice. Beautiful.



Raw, dirty, blues-infused, no-holds-barred, nihilistic, take-no-prisoners. There are many more words I could use to describe the music of The Black Keys but if, like me, you're into real, heartfelt music and not the Justin Bieber drivel that gets put out by the corporate machine, then, watch the next clip, "Just Got To Be". Rocking.



In June, for Father's Day, I gave myself a present, or rather, several presents. I bought four CDs which had long been on my endless "Saved Items" queue on amazon.co.uk. Of the four, Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale's record "Breathing Under Water" is the one that gets played the most. And "PD7" is one of my favourite numbers. I hope it becomes yours, too. By the way, if you want to listen to another highlight from the album, the magnificent 'Little Glass Folk', click here. It's mesmerising, to say the least. The only reason I didn't include it is that the clip is just an image of the CD cover. I'm quite fussy when it comes to uploading videos on my blog. Have a nice week!



Next Post: "While My MP3 Gently Plays", to be published on Sunday 7th August at 10am (GMT)