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Windrush Scandal: By Accident or Design?

Tracey Reynolds, Dave Hockham and Pamela Franklin

The decision by Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, in January 2023 to scrap the pledge by the Government to implement key reforms of Windrush Lessons Learned review exposes the shameful history of successive UK governments towards Caribbean people. This involves decades of immigration law and policies, and the ongoing racism, racial inequalities and injustices that older Caribbean migrants –  the so-called Windrush Generation – and their descendants continue to experience  (Runnymede Trust, 2018).

The hostile environment legislation, which in 2012 sought strict enforcement of immigration controls, revealed that the government did not have a clear understanding of the impact of its immigration policies (Quershi et al 2021).  The hostile environment affected tens of thousands of the Windrush Generation, Caribbean Commonwealth citizens who arrived in UK between 1948 and 1973 on invitation from the UK government to take up jobs and re-build the NHS and other key sectors following the second world war.

The Windrush Scandal first emerged in 2017 after news reports showed that Caribbean older people, were being wrongfully detained, deported and  denied basic human rights (Gentlemen 2019).  They included victims who were denied cancer treatments through the NHS, despite paying decades of national insurance contributions, because they could not show ‘documentary evidence’ that they had lived in the UK continuously since arriving from the Caribbean as a child or young adult in the post-war period (Goodfellow, 2020).

Following widespread public condemnation of inhumane mistreatment of these Caribbean older people, the Windrush Compensation Scheme was set up in 2019 to compensate victims that suffered hardship and loss as a result of not being able to demonstrate their lawful citizenship status.  However, campaigners supporting the victims criticised the government of further compounding the racial injustice experienced by them because of the slow and over-complicated process to apply for compensation. To date, only 5% of victims have been successfully compensated in the last four years despite a government promise to redress those wrongly classified by the Home Office as illegal immigrants. Within this period many have also died (often from health complications resulting from their wrongful classification) before receiving payment.  

As noted by the various scholars assessing hostile environment policies, the Government is hardening its approach to immigration policies, including promising to fast-track the detention and removal of illegal migrants and undocumented workers (see Blitz; Erel et al; Ryan et al and Gawlewicz et al, this special issue). The victims of the Windrush Scandal are once again the recipients of this hard-line anti-immigration rhetoric.  In the past two years, compensation pay-outs to victims have significantly stalled, with an increased number of claims being refused. In 2022, for example, there was nearly twice as many refusals (735) or zero sums offered as pay-outs compared to 453 refusals in 2021 (Independent 2022).

Engaging Caribbean Older People in research

The impact of the Windrush scandal on the Caribbean community, particularly among Caribbean older people has been unprecedented.  This impact and its legacy on Caribbean communities was explored with Caribbean older people in two studies. The first study involved focus group discussions with 9 Caribbean older people (6 women and 3 men) who attended weekly lunchtime drop-in sessions at a south-London branch of Age UK in 2022.  The purpose of this study was to undertake a needs assessment of services following a return to in-person services after the COVID-19 pandemic.  We use the discussion to reflect how the hostile environment reinformed negative stereotypes about Caribbean migration to the UK, which overlooked their long contribution to this country.

A second study, Let our Legacy Continue Project, in 2020, involved research collaboration with Caribbean Social Forum, a community organisation providing social, health and cultural support for Caribbean people aged 50 years old and above in South London. It currently has a membership of 600 people. Our project involved eight co-created online weekly research workshops, with a group of 12 Caribbean older people. We explored Caribbean migration to the UK, and its legacy and impact. The personal stories and artefacts shared led to a live gallery exhibition in October 2020 and an online gallery launched November 2021 (Hockham et al, 2022).  The study took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Consequently, workshops were conducted over Zoom and, for the exhibition, we had to find new visual representative ways of discussing issues of ‘race’, racism, and themes of representation that emerged out of the Windrush scandal.  

Findings

A main finding to emerge is how this scandal challenged participants’ experience of what it means to be settled in a country, despite living here for 60-70 years.  They expressed fears that their UK citizenship status could be removed without notice, and their access to health and social care and state benefits, their pensions, and homes. The following quotation by Dorothy, age 74, a retired nurse, highlights this concern:

My dearest wish is to go home to Grenada, [to] visit my brother and my nieces and family before I die. But I can’t travel because first it was COVID that stopped me from travelling and now we are hearing all these stories of people going home for a holiday and they can’t get back into the country when land at Heathrow [passport control], or they are deported. This has made me scared to take the chance as I don’t want any problems.

The Caribbean older people in the ‘Let our Legacy Continue’ study, noted the care and attention taken to share the stories, documents and co-curate the materials for the exhibition. This is in direct contrast to how immigration records of Caribbean people held by UK government were destroyed, ensuring that people were unable to get documentation to prove their immigration status. 

Participants shared the view that the destruction of documents was not an accident or unintentional action by the Home Office as media reports concluded when the scandal was exposed. Instead, this represented a wilful, and deliberate act by the Government to prevent citizenship claims by Caribbean people; underlying the fact that racism lies at the heart of the immigration policies and the laws governing Caribbean migrants’ application for UK citizenship.

They shared personal experiences of how immigration laws are actively used against Caribbean and other racialised migrant ethnic groups to remind them of not belonging in the UK, despite living and actively contributing to society for many decades.  The state endorsement of immigration policies, which act as a barrier to Caribbean people exercising citizenship rights, also encourage racist attitudes, behaviour  and discrimination from members of the public and across a broad spectrum of societal institutions.

One example of this, emerging during the focus groups and workshops discussions, was stories shared about the 1981 British Nationality Act, and how this immigration legislation was designed to prevent Caribbean people from securing citizenship. It would eventually lead to the Windrush Scandal. The previous legislation, the 1971 Immigration Act, confirmed that the Windrush generation had, and have, the right of abode in the UK. But they were not given any documents to demonstrate this status. Nor were records kept. They had no reason to doubt their status, or that they belonged in the UK. They could not have been expected to know the complexity of the law as it changed around them. By the early 1980s, then PM Margaret Thatcher expressed concern that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. This resulted in the 1981 British Nationality Act requiring citizens from ‘new Commonwealth’ territories who had settled in the UK to register to become British citizens.  

The participants recalled that the application process for registering for citizenship discouraged members of the Windrush generation from exercising their time-limited right to register as British citizens, meaning that Caribbean people lost their right to remain.  Many people did not realise the change in immigration law directly impacted them, primarily because they arrived on passports which had ‘territory of UK’, so they thought change in legislation did not apply to them.  Also, adults who arrived in UK as babies and children on their parents’ passports, and had never travelled, did have not passports or documentation confirming their citizenship status.

Speaking to Caribbean older people about this period, they recalled this policy change was not well promoted or publicized by UK media and Home Office; instead, those that have re-applied for citizenship were made aware of the need to do, primarily by news of the important change to immigration status travelling by word of mouth and people’s social networks. This meant that others who did not have the contacts and networks missed out on this news.  A common viewpoint shared by the participants that the lack of public attention was motivated by racist immigration legislation, specifically the Government’s agenda to reduce the UK’s non-white population. This belief was further strengthened by the political and social environment. Following the 1981 Brixton riots, the national mood was hostile against Caribbean people, and so there was a lack of public outcry or wider support against this injustice.

Fear and suspicion by Caribbean older people were also now embedded in everyday interactions, with health social and welfare providers. Following the declaration of a ‘hostile environment’, those working in these agencies have been turned into enforcement officers, policing racialised migrants’ citizenship status and their access to public services.  Findings suggest that Caribbean people are now less likely to turn to support from these agencies.  This is particularly worrying because COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the way in which structural racism, health inequalities and increased social isolation and loneliness impact BAME older people. They are therefore more likely to need health and social care services. If they chose not to access public services, a knock-on effect is the additional demands on community services and voluntary providers to address these needs.

However, voluntary and community sector are already overstretched, a legacy of the government’s austerity agenda, resulting in cuts to funding level and service provision. Yet, In the face of hardening immigration legislation towards migrants, local voluntary and community organisations are being increasingly asked to step in to provide additional care services, that previously provided by statutory care providers.

This also meant pivoting their services to support victims and their families impacted by the Windrush scandal. For instance, both Age UK, and Caribbean Social Forum, offer free legal advice and services to help victims of the immigration scandal apply for compensation. They also offer advice and information to family members, who are supporting these victims. This includes bereavement service, to supports family members who have ‘lost’ individuals because of deportation to the Caribbean.  There is also a concern for physical and psychological impacts on older people detained and deported. Not only are they separated from their family and community networks in the UK, but they are deported back to countries, places they might have migrated from years ago, with no family ties or cultural connections to the place they left.

We also used the theme of legacy to relate the Windrush Scandal and its impact on the descendants of Caribbean older people. One aspect, often overlooked in research, is that future generations have been trapped within the system because of hostile environment policies. This includes the Windrush Kids, young people born to undocumented parents, and who only become aware of their irregular migration status when they reach 18 years old, or apply for university or for a job. A report by Coram Children’s Legal Centre highlighted that as many as 100,000 undocumented young people are unable to prove they are British citizens, despite them being technically UK citizens, who are born, and grew up in the country. The complexity of the immigration systems, and high costs to regularise their status prevents them getting the paperwork to prove their citizenship, leaving them in legal limbo.

To conclude, there is compelling evidence to indicate the Windrush Scandal was not an accident, as suggested by policymakers, but was created by design as the deliberate and inevitable action to make life impossible for racialised migrants in UK, and to remind them that no matter how long they reside or settle in UK, they are considered as not completely belonging here.  What clearly emerges as a legacy of the Windrush Scandal is that Caribbean older people and later generations, can never be deemed as truly settled because of the way they continue to experience a fragile and precarious relationship to UK citizenship.

References

Gentleman, A (2019) The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, Guardian Faber Publishing

Goodfellow, M (2020) Hostile Environment: How immigrants Became Scapegoats, London: Verso

Tracey Reynolds is Professor of Social Sciences and Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Greenwich. Tracey’s research areas focus on Black and racialised migrant families and communities. Tracey’s projects involve research collaborations with neighbourhood community organisations using creative, participatory and co-produced projects to explore migrant family’s community resilience and the impact of hostile environment policies; and to co-produce creative tools, and training resources for community leadership and local actions for change. Tracey’s achievement was recently recognised in a national exhibition Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors and Talk at South Bank Centre, Oct-Nov 2020.This exhibition showcased 45 Black female Professors in the UK (out of a total of 21,000 Professors).

David Hockham is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Scenography and Associate Head of School for Student Success in the School of Stage and Screen at the University of Greenwich.  As a Scenographer, David is interested in the process of creating worlds on and off stage, thinking through how social and material components come together to form activities,  structures and systems within differing contexts: education, work and beyond.  Alongside this, David is co-director of internationally touring theatre company, Dead Rabbits, which tells stories from often under-represented perspectives. 

Pamela Franklin is registered disabled and the Chair of the Caribbean Social Forum a group formed to support the social and wellbeing of the Windrush Generation aged 50+.    The Chair and the committee work at creating various programmes to keep members engaged.  This includes working in partnership with establishments that are looking at increasing their older and ethnic majority audiences or learning about individual history from leaving the Caribbean to settling in the UK.    Pamela is also a trustee of St Georges Garrison Church and was recently given an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Greenwich. 

Header Image Credit: Ingrid Pollard and Caribbean Social Forum

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

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Iranian Zoomers, A Generation of Bravery, Hope and Invincibility

Atlas Torbati

In mid-September 2022, furious and impassioned protests spread across dozens of Iranian cities following the tragic death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Protests inspired by the demand for personal freedom for women followed by the slogan, ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ erupted, from Tabriz in northern Azerbaijan to southern Bandar Abbas along the Persian Gulf coast, from Sanandaj in the Kurdish west to eastern Mashhad, the pilgrimage city and Iran’s second largest city. Tens of thousands of Iranians came out into the streets and many continue to do so to this day, despite the regime’s violent and deadly crackdowns and threats of arrest.  

For the first time many Iranian men have accompanied women, shoulder to shoulder, chanting ‘death to the dictator’ and ‘we will kill, we will kill the one who killed our sister’, demanding social justice and regime change.  The burning of headscarves is perhaps one of the most public and explicit rejections of the religious restrictions that are imposed forcefully by Islamic Republic upon women since its onset.  The inclusivity and diversity of these protests has made them distinctive compared to the previous ones in 2009, 2017 and 2019 and this is due to the participation of various people from different cultural, religiou,s class and ethnic backgrounds.

These protests were often led by teenage girls and boys and young women and men, known as Generation Z, studying at high schools and universities.  They demonstrated the bravest challenge to the theocracy in more than a decade. Iran’s Generation Z are born between 1997 and 2012 – known as daheye hashtad or the 80s (the 1380s of the Iranian calendar). They form only about 6 million of the country’s population of 83 million, and, to now, they have unarguably been among the primary leaders of the current demonstrations. In fact, a significant difference between the current and previous waves of protests has been the prominent role performed by the country’s Generation Z, also known as Zoomers.

Zoomers grew up more connected, better educated, and more socially active than previous generations. One of the most interesting and important characteristics of this generation is the sense of self- sufficiency. Unlike previous generations in Iran, they freely speak about their interests, beliefs  and disbeliefs, even if it crosses the red lines of traditional, societal and religious norms and practices. According to Jabbar Rahmani, an assistant professor of anthropology at the Tehran-based Institute for Social and Cultural Studies, “this generation does not adhere to idealism and ideological idealizations like the previous generation.”

The zoomer generation are “digital natives” (Csobanka, 2016) since they have had greater access to the outside world and have grown up submersed in the social media and internet. The international language of technology and hashtags have connected them widely.  Their key demand is social justice and achieving their fundamental human rights.

This generation have developed a great analytical skill through being actively present on various platforms such as Club House , Twitter, Youtube, etc to raise their voice and concerns and courageously speak out.  As a result, they tend to question and criticise authority and  do not accept and respect the patriarchal laws and regulations of the Islamic Republic such as the compulsory hijab. For instance a video of Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old You-tuber who was beaten to death on September 22, demonstrates her savvy understanding of the freedom enjoyed by her counterparts elsewhere around the world. She states “We ask ourselves why aren’t we having fun like the young people in New York and Los Angeles?” In a YouTube video, she said, “We are in need of joy and recreation, good spirit, good vibes, good energy. In order to have these, we need freedom.”

The massive engagement of this generation on social media has forced the Iranian officials to introduce the National Information Network, a domestic or “halal” internet apart from the international internet used by much of the world. In fact, Khamenei, in a June speech, pushed parliament to endorse a contentious internet bill, the Regulatory System for Cyberspace Services Bill, also known as the Protection Bill. This shows a zero-tolerance policy toward anything considered hostile to the Islamic revolution’s identity.

However, the Generation Z have not limited themselves only to the online world .Through writing graffiti, preparing, and distributing announcements to invite the public to join the protests and national strikes to raise their profile outside of Iran. Another fascinating characteristic of this generation is the sense of responsibility to act collectively in strikes and protests. The similar style of posts and contents on social media, the use of hashtags and the twitter storms that they create, are examples of the strong sense of responsibly they have in order to grow and speed up this movement.

One of the most courageous performances of this generation is when schoolgirls refused to sing a song praising Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after an October 13 raid on a high school in Ardabil. This was a reaction to the death of Asra Panahi, a 15-year-old girl, who was reportedly beaten to death by undercover officers. In Sanandaj, schoolgirls burned pages of their textbooks containing a photograph of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They also chanted “Death to Khamenei,” the  successor of Ayatollah Khomeini.

In Tehran, schoolgirls airbrushed a photo of Khamenei on a classroom wall and replaced it with a photo of Mahsa Amini. In Tabriz another group of schoolgirls stamped on a picture of the two clerics, then tore it. Following the slogan, “Clerics, get lost,” the students at Al Zahra University, a college for women in Tehran, made bonfires across the streets during President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit on October 8. These are just a few among hundreds of images recently shared on social media by students who are part of Iran’s Generation Z. Such remarkable moments show how courageous they are in the face of political oppression and violence while fearlessly risking their lives to amplify their voice for freedom and justice

However, this is not the first time that the Iranian Gen-Z appeared in public crossing the red lines and resisting the police. In 2016 a large crowd of high school students got together to celebrate the end of school year exams at a shopping mall in the west of Tehran. The gathering was dispersed by the police with tear gas and baton. The authorities’ responses to all these moments were criminal charges, suppression, and detentions, and more recently,  death by execution and a call for re-enforcing Islamic values such as compulsory hijab and increasing restrictions over social media and internet.  

This fear and repression is intended to disempower the Zoomers and is meant to scare them and drive them away from social and political upheavals such as the current protests. However, in Iran, Gen-Z continue to take to the streets in defiance, even organising their own marches against the brutal crackdown of the Islamic Republic. Their willingness to take risks and their sense of entitlement to social justice has spread the message of Woman, Life, Freedom across borders. It is important to say that their bravery has inspired the global community to support the movement through posting stories to bring attention to the oppression faced by Iranians, including extrajudicial killings and torture.

The unexpected participation of this furious generation might be surprising for some and even some authority officials, but in reality, many academics and sociologists had identified such a courageous movement for some time. A few years ago, Saeed Razavi Faqih, a sociologist, and former political prisoner provided an analysis of Iran’s socio-political situation called “The eighties [Gen Z] will pass everyone” and warned about  many of events and scenes that are taking place in the streets of Iran today.

His analysis was that,“this new generation has completely different demands, trends, and views and basically shares no common language with the managers and officials of the country’s administration.” While pointing out to the fact that these young people would start entering universities in 2020, he warned “as soon as they [Iranian Zoomers] become aware of their ability to influence and bring about change, this mass population ruling the universities in big and small cities will transform everything.” This issue has been highlighted by other researchers and scholars such as Zohreh Najafiasl as  a ‘deep generational gap’ (2019) which is defined as detachment and lack of  conformity of children from parents (Najafiasl, 2019) . In her view one of the most important features of this gap is a “sense of rebellion” against anything that is considered tradition by the youth” (Najafiasl, 2019; p.60).

Others consider this gap as the fourth driver of tension and a possible threat to the Islamic Republic’s values. Due to having a pluralistic view, the Zoomers will be hard to govern and their control will not be as easy as with previous generations. This generation is not the ideal Islamic youth that former revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had anticipated. Rather, they baffled the clerics with their western behaviour such as drug use, bizarre outfits, and partying. They are the children of social media who are resisting against the country’s decision-makers and no longer trust traditional media. Instead, they turn to foreign-based media.

However, in spite of years of warnings about the enormous changes and the social dynamics that the generational gap imposes, the Iranian officials have chosen  to close a blind eye to this issue and have refused systematic reforms or adopting any liberal changes and developments to acknowledge uprising Zoomers’ demands and requests. Instead, the Iranian officials are utilising resources and adopting hostile policies to enforce additional constraints on those who abandon the values of theocratic government. Calling the protesters isolated, corrupt and anarchist, the Islamic Republic ostracises this cohort and does not recognise the distinctiveness of their beliefs and behaviours.

Most of the Zoomers are disgusted with the unceasing systemic corruption, hypocrisy, and the general disastrous socio-economic situation . It is important to note that this new generation of Iranian youth are also nurtured under nearly two decades of economic sanctions and international isolation impelled by a nuclear program that Iranians increasingly question. They are hopeless and have no faith in a brighter future. Therefore, the current political upheaval is a great chance for Gen Z to seize the moment to directly oppose the Islamic Republic. Zoomers see no brightness in their future, even in the decreasingly likely event that the Iran nuclear deal is revived.

Some reformist experts such as Mostafa Tajerzadeh believes that in order to resolve this predicament, officials must review and reform many of the policies in accordance with the requirements of a modern society. However, other political activists with  secular views, such as Narges Mohammadi, believe that the Islamic republic is unlikely to comply with the needs of  modern society since  submitting to one demand would pave the way for extensive and far-reaching demands in the future. It seems that the Iranian government can neither completely suppress this new generation, nor it can ignore them. In fact, ignoring the Generation Z will only lead to further radicalization.

The recent executions of young men, and the sentences to death of many others, are the Islamic Republic’s aggressive response.  Majid Reza Rahnavar, Mohsen Shekari, Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini were executed recently for allegedly killing two members of the parliamentary Basij forces and wounding four others. All these young men were convicted of “moharabeh,” or “waging war against God,” and after expedited legal proceedings, were sentenced to death. Human rights advocates have emphasised the impropriety of the trials, dearth of legal representation, and the pervasiveness of “coerced confessions” as the result of the systemic torture.  

Although the outcome of the current protests is far from certain, one thing is clear, Iranian Zoomers are determined to bring change, have radical ambitions for their country’s future, and an influential role in shaping their history. They will have a very active role to play.

References:

Csobanka, Z. E. (2016) The Z Generation. Acta Technologica Dubnicae, 6 (2)

Najafiasl, Z., 2015. Intergenerational Gap: An Emerging Phenomenon in Iran. IAU International Journal of Social Sciences, 5 (1), 59–70.

Atlas Torbati is a lecturer on MA Understanding Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse (UDVSA) at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a senior tutor at the Department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies. She has extensive experience in teaching the Theories of Gender-based violence, Groupwork studies, National and International Policies of Gender-based Violence and Social Research Methods. Twitter: @atlasi82

Header Image Credit: Roshi Rouzbehani

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Ignorance

Sally Tomlinson

How far has Ignorance – one of William Beveridge’s five Giants that stalked the land in 1942 – been overcome some eighty years later?  My father left school at 14 in 1914, becoming a messenger on a bike for the army in the Great War. At the start of World War 2, in 1939, some 88% of young people still left school at 14 – not much progress there. But over the next 80 years, through which I have lived, starting school as a child evacuee, the Giant was hobbled if not completely eradicated. Ignorance seems, however, to have regrouped and recovered as the free market ideology, dating especially from the Thatcher years, has produced in England, (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now have separate systems)  a pointlessly competitive and  potentially corrupt  schooling system.  

Other countries in post-war Europe managed to banish much ignorance in their populations through more just and equitable education, without the often hostile denigration of England’s state-maintained system and its teachers.  Schools in England have been turned into business-oriented institutions with all the claims for confidentiality, efficiency and performance that characterize business.  Parents have been demonized as vigilantes at worst and nuisances at best. Criticism of policy and practice is discouraged and claims that governments are interested in ‘what works’ avoids the question ‘works for whom?’

There have been many advances in education over the years, especially up to the 1970s. But Beveridge himself envisaged only a simple system of more literacy, numeracy and skills for the working classes, and noted the hostility of many of his own class to educating the masses.  The determination of many politicians and policy-makers to retain a social-class based school system, extolling ‘academic’ schooling, downgrading the ’vocational’ and allowing the obscene levels of child poverty that now characterizes our post-pandemic society, has helped to reproduce a divided and divisive system.

The people in charge of a state-maintained system have, even today, almost all been educated in a separate private system, with an astonishing number attending the University of Oxford

The people in charge of a state-maintained system have, even today, almost all been educated in a separate private system, with an astonishing number attending the University of Oxford, with some clinging to eugenic beliefs that the ‘lower’ classes and some minorities have lower innate intellectual capacities. As one writer has suggested, it is ‘public schools boys’ who still mainly run and perhaps ‘ruin’ Britain (Verkaik 2018). They are supporters of a theory of ignorance – agnotology. This describes the deliberate production of ignorance by those with power, who use lies and misinformation to confuse and control the rest of us. Attendance at the ‘public’ school Eton makes it far more likely that a person will end up as Prime Minister! Our recent Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is unusual in that she actually attended a comprehensive school before she went on to take a degree at Oxford University, but she has tried to suggest her old school was not good enough, which infuriated the school!

So how did the English school system go about deciding who should get certain kinds of knowledge and who should be kept ignorant of much important knowledge. Cyril Norwood’s 1943 White Paper on educational reconstruction and the 1944 Butler Education Act famously recommended schooling from 5-15 years with ‘elementary’, now primary, school to 11 years. This was to be followed by attendance at one of three types of secondary school: grammar, technical or secondary modern, plus special schooling for those with a ‘disability of body or mind’ and an exam at 11 to ‘select’ the academic child, who, like me, often left school not knowing how to change a light bulb.

By the 1970s only a small number of local authorities retained their grammar schools, with a vociferous lobby that continues to the present day to urge grammar school expansion with rampant hostility towards comprehensive schooling. Many urban secondary modern schools, underfunded and with a high turnover of teachers, became the  comprehensives so easily derided into the 21st century as ‘bog standard’ and ripe for conversion into ‘Academies’.

The establishment of Academy schools and their Trusts as corporate entities responsible for their own budgets, outside the purview of local education authorities, and with their expansion into Multi-Academy Trusts (MATS),  removed many powers from local authorities. It also diverted funds from actual teaching and learning into the high salaries of CEOs and payments to unelected Trustees who manage multiple schools and the education of hundreds, if not thousands of children. The academization rigmarole has left the public largely ignorant of  how schools are run and operate, and some parents, particularly of those with  children  with special educational needs,  furious  as to how the government  makes claims about provision which are simply not fulfilled.  It has also created, as many commentators have pointed out, a system that is ripe for corruption and lacks any democratic underpinning.

The success of comprehensive schooling has exposed the lies about every child’s ability to learn and represents a genuine removal of ignorance

But the slow success in attacking the Giant of Ignorance was based on an expansion of schooling first to age 15, then in 1972 to 16, then in 2013 joining other European countries in requiring young people to stay in education  or skills training to 18. The success of comprehensive schooling has exposed the lies about every child’s ability to learn and represents a genuine removal of ignorance. Despite this, governments over the years have consistently refused to acknowledge the benefits of teaching children of all backgrounds together, as happens in Finland and Canada, which top international exam league tables such as PISA (the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment).

Further success in overcoming ignorance has been the gradual acceptance that girls’ brains are equal to those of boys, although even up to the 1960s a report suggested that a majority of girls should primarily  be educated to be wives and mothers. Once girls were offered more equal schooling, by the 2000s they began to outperform boys at almost all levels in tests and examinations, including in 2021 in maths examinations at 16. But women teachers did not receive equal pay with men until 1960, and women still struggle to translate their educational success into business and professional lives.  

Another success has been a focus on the early years, those who were termed ‘infants’ and were taught in separate infant schools into the 1960s. Early years education in nursery and reception classes has become an important policy focus. Nationwide, Children’s Centres, despite funding reductions and being part privatized, have become a way of guarding against ignorances in later years.

By the1980s with more comprehensive schools established and Kenneth Baker’s GCSE (with all its faults) in place, test scores rose steadily

Lies and misinformation abound on the standards front.  By improving primary education and allowing   more secondary students to actually prepare for and take examinations, standards as measured by test results rose steadily. Attempts by eugenically inclined Black Paper writers and some politicians to claim that standards were, or are, falling or slipping are simply not true. In the 1960s some 20% of pupils took the (then) GCE, secondary modern pupils were downgraded to a lower type of exam (CSE). By the1980s with more comprehensive schools established and Kenneth Baker’s GCSE (with all its faults) in place, test scores rose steadily.

By 1991 some 50% of 16-year-olds taking GCSE exams passed with the benchmark of A–C, by 2018 nearly 70% of those who sat the exams gained the A–C equivalent. The 5% entering universities in Beveridge’s time had become 35% by the 1990s and well over 40% in the 2000s. A continued failure has been the lack of information, funding, resources and respect for Further Education and apprenticeships, which has left a trail of ignorance in its wake over provision for vocational courses and training in crucial skills.

Partial success at removing ignorance does include the greater attention paid to children and young people who, after Mary Warnock’s report in 1978, became children with special educational needs (disability added in 1995 to make SEND). Despite the failures in adequate funding, expanded labelling and confusing legislation both in schools and the wider society, there is now a much greater acceptance of educational needs and disabilities. Inclusion has become a popular concept, if not a reality. Schools continue to exclude pupils who are troublesome or problematic, especially if they fail to contribute to higher exam scores in the competitive market of testing and funding, and there is a potential resurgence of ignorance with the development of ‘Alternative Provision’.

There has been mixed success in the reduction of violence in schools since the legal violence allowing teachers to hit children was abolished in 1987 (1999 in private schools). Unlike other European countries it is still legal in 2022 for parents to hit their children. In some mainly urban schools, violence between pupils and gang rivalries spill over but by and large schools are reasonably orderly places. The harassment of girls, gay and trans pupils, and even teachers, aided by the use of social media is a new component of the Giant not envisaged or acknowledged in the Beveridge times. Schools can lay the basis but cannot be expected to teach civil and moral behaviour in a society that is not supportive of such behaviour.

The biggest barrier to reducing ignorance has been the narrowing of the school curriculum

But the biggest barrier to reducing Ignorance has been the narrowing of the school curriculum by successive governments into a vehicle for government-approved learning, the ultimate aim being to pass tests and examinations rather than to educate. Policed by Ofsteds, Ofquals and dictats on what can and cannot be taught and influenced by politicians who look back on their own ‘traditional’ schooling, extolling Latin and misunderstanding the digital world are all supports for Ignorance. Most teachers think that the curriculum does not contribute to the broad and balanced knowledge promised in legislation. The failure to teach the truthful history of imperialism and how Britain became multiracial and multicultural counts as a ‘Monstrous Ignorance’ which is slowly being recognized. The Black Lives Matter movement and the acknowledgement of racism in sport are currently doing more to educate the population and help decrease racism and xenophobia than schools.

Those in government during World War 2, Beveridge, Attlee and Butler, who had all been educated in ‘public’ schools, knew something of the lives of the ‘common people’, and they were joined in government by a few working-class men and women. The private system may have given them confidence and entitlement, but they had the humility to realize that the country not only needed a better educated work force, it also needed to become a fairer and more socially just democratic society.  It did not need the strategies that keep much of the population in ignorance and deny them important knowledge.

The Giant of Ignorance will not be demolished until a comprehensive school system and a fair, re-imagined common curriculum for all children and young people is the accepted mode of schooling

Those in charge now seem to have lost humility and empathy and to have minimal knowledge and understanding of the lives of most of their fellow citizens. The current private school and selective state policies seems guaranteed to perpetuate such ignorance.  The marketization and semi-privatization of schooling and the ending of much democratic control through local authorities are ugly and ignorant policies. The Giant of Ignorance will not be demolished until a comprehensive school system and a fair, re-imagined common curriculum for all children and young people is the accepted mode of schooling.

But this is not a fairy story, so never underestimate Giants.

Drawn from Sally Tomlinson’s book, Ignorance, with Agenda Publishing.

References:

Verkaik, R. 2018. Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain. London: Oneworld.

Sally Tomlinson started her career as a social worker and infant school teacher and has worked in higher education for over thirty-five years. She has taught, researched and written in the areas of race, ethnicity and education, educational policy and special and inclusive education and was a member of the Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, which reported in 2000. She has held Professorial Chairs at the University of Lancaster, England;  University of Wales, Swansea; and as Goldsmiths Professor of Education Policy and Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also served as a Pro-Warden (Vice Principal). She is now Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths, and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford.

Header Image Credit: Agenda Publishing

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Tomlinson, Sally 2022. ‘Ignorance’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (3):

The Trojan Horse affair; an official’s version

John Holmwood

The claim that ‘hard-line Islamist’ governors and teachers were taking over schools in Birmingham (and elsewhere) emerged in early 2014. The story was actively promoted in the media, fuelled by leaks from the different investigations that were put in place by official bodies. Eight years later and few journalists have sought to revisit the affair, not even in the aftermath of the Serial/ New York Times Trojan Horse podcast. The latter provided a detailed examination of the affair and the letter that instigated it over eight episodes. However, no British journalist working in the mainstream media has sought to re-examine the affair in the light of the holes in the official narrative that the podcast revealed.

Instead, the response has been to reiterate the ‘findings’ of a number of different inquiries – for example, by Ofsted, the Education Funding Agency (EFA), the Clarke Report and the Kershaw Report. They all arrived at similar conclusions and, so, the ‘facts’, it is held, are not in dispute. Moreover, the convergence among the different inspections and inquiries, is, itself, also confirmation that something was seriously amiss.

This official version of the affair is central to a recent book on its aftermath, The Birmingham Book: Lessons in urban education leadership and policy from the Trojan Horse affair, edited by one of the key figures in a number of the inquiries, Colin Diamond. Although not responding to the podcast directly –  he is reported elsewhere as calling it ‘one-sided’ and ‘unethical’ – the book covers the main events, albeit with an eye on the future beyond the affair and the lessons learned.

The ‘facts’ that he and most other commentators believe to be confirmed, however, derive from uncorroborated claims by ‘whistleblowers’. These were leaked to the media by the Department for Education (DfE), and, to a lesser extent, by Birmingham City Council (BCC). They were later set out in the Clarke and Kershaw reports, both published in July 2014, where it was argued that they formed a pattern. However, no specific allegation was tested in these reports. The implication was that, even if some of the claims could not be corroborated, sufficient of them would remain to prove the case against the teachers and governors. Paragraph 6.6 of the Clarke Report, for example, lists 20 allegations against Park View School, together with the laconic observation that, “it is only fair to point out the Trust disputed most, if not all, of the … allegations.” As we shall see, the various inquiries were also not independent of each other.

The affair unravels

I will begin with the part of the Trojan Horse affair that Colin Diamond and mainstream media commentators do not discuss. This is what happened after the Clarke and Kershaw reports were published. Clarke proposed that professional misconduct hearings should be pursued against those involved. Cases were not begun against teachers and senior leaders associated with Park View Education Trust (PVET) until September 2015 and against teachers at Oldknow in November 2015. They were the first time that the allegations were properly formulated and the evidence to support the charges put forward. This was well over a year after the claims against the teachers were publicised and after major changes to the government’s counter extremism strategy, Prevent, were introduced following the affair (the consequences of the affair in a new Prevent duty on schools and other providers of public services plays little part in Diamond’s book).

Many of the lurid claims that formed the media narratives – of both conservative and liberal commentators, alike – did not make the ‘cut’. Moreover, the overarching charge that was laid against the teachers had nothing to do with ‘extremism’, but involved, ‘agreeing with others to the inclusion of an undue amount of religious influence in the education of pupils’ (as it was put in the NCTL Hearing against the senior leaders at PVET).

The cases dragged on for over eighteen months and in May 2017, the main case against the senior leaders collapsed and other actions were discontinued. The reason was malpractice by lawyers acting for the government who had failed to disclose evidence relevant to the defence. There was some outrage expressed in the media that the teachers had ‘got off’. There was no examination of the implications of the collapse from the perspective of the veracity of the claims made against them, nor of the nature of the charges that had been put forward against them.

Yet, from the first headlines about the affair in March 2014, its scale and scope had been slowly unravelling. It had started with 21 Ofsted investigations, 2 EFA investigations and 2 official reports, but had come to focus on just 4 schools. Media reports at the height of the affair anticipated as many as 100 teachers being charged with professional misconduct. In the event, 6 hearings were planned, involving just 12 teachers.

One hearing involving 2 teachers failed to get to the starting line; then there were 10. One hearing involving 2 teachers provided a guilty verdict, which was quashed at the High Court for procedural irregularities associated with non-disclosure of evidence; then there were 8. Another hearing ended with a not proven verdict, and  one other found the teacher guilty of minor irregularities meriting no further action; now there were 6.

The most significant of the cases involved 5 senior leaders at PVET (those charged included the white, atheist female head teacher and senior executive at the Trust, and a Sikh teacher). The collapse of this case left just 1 person, the acting head teacher at Oldknow who had joined the school in April 2013. He was found guilty. His case had been brought later than the others (in November 2015), but it concluded before the High Court quashed the first case, precipitating the concerns about the non-disclosure of evidence. By the time that the full extent of the misconduct by the government’s lawyers had become evident he was out of time for an appeal.

The slow unravelling of the cases against the teachers might have stimulated media interest, but it did not. The Panel’s judgement in the senior teachers’ case was also noteworthy. The defence had moved that the hearing be discontinued on the grounds that the case against the senior leaders had not been made out. The Panel was disinclined to accept this argument, but it also had to consider the implications of the newly disclosed evidence. It is important to note, as did the Panel, that the new evidence could have been included within the hearing. Although disclosed at a very late stage, it happened while the hearing was still underway and so could have been tested by extending the hearing (as had already occurred on several occasions). The Panel refused to discontinue on the grounds put forward by the defence, only to do so abruptly because of serious ‘impropriety’ by the government lawyers.

There was no media call for the lawyers to be charged with professional misconduct, no media examination of the specific charges that had been laid against the senior leaders, no examination of the evidence that had been put forward, or the arguments made in cross examination.[1] Instead, there was a simple default to the ‘facts’ supposedly already established by Clarke. Much of this is laid out in two episodes of the podcast (and in a book written by myself, together with Therese O’Toole, Countering Extremism in British Schools? The truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair).

Cleaning the stable?

Colin Diamond was appointed in August 2015 as deputy to Sir Mike Tomlinson who had been made education commissioner for Birmingham. Three years later Diamond left to take up a post as Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Birmingham where he runs an MA in Educational Leadership. The book is the fruit of that experience. It purports to be an insider’s account of rebuilding school governance in Birmingham, but it is coy about subjecting the affair itself to retrospective analysis.

Instead, it is something of a ‘bricolage’ with school leaders associated with the MA programme supplying chapters, each introduced with an editorial commentary by Diamond. I will not address the chapters separately (which are of variable quality, including some that are very good), but how they are interpreted by Diamond. Overall, the flavour of the book is well-captured by the foreword from Professor Mick Waters: “reading this book, it is easy to imagine the screenplay for a film of the ‘feel good’ genre. The vignettes appear so often. With the right music, a cinema audience would be carried along with a story offering an emotional switchback” (page iii).

It is clear that Diamond sees himself as a hero in the story, but he is reticent about his role. He decries the ‘Islamophobia’ of Michael Gove and media reports and suggests that it is mistaken to see the affair as being about ‘extremism’.  Indeed, at one point in the book he also declares his opposition to the idea of ‘fundamental British values’  – he calls it a “latter-day exhumation of the Tebbit test incorporated into statute” (page 336). Yet, even if the duty on schools to promote fundamental British values was introduced after the Trojan Horse affair and seemingly in response to it, they were a central concern of the Clarke Report and the other inspections. They were cited in the banning order issued against Tahir Alam in September 2015, for “conduct which is aimed at undermining fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” Diamond seemingly affirms the veracity of the Clarke Report at the same time as distancing himself from its framing.

Much of what Diamond writes is self-justification after the fact, and it is not accompanied by any real reflection on his own role in the unfolding of the affair. According to him, ‘Trojan horse activities’ happened within the schools and needed to be stopped. Moreover, he believes that they were of long standing and have remained ever-present within the local community continuing to cause problems in the form of significant community pressures on school leaders –  for example, around LGBT issues (it doesn’t help that his introduction to a chapter on the parent protests of 2019 which discusses the ‘No Outsiders’ curriculum at Parkfield school treats that curriculum as being about prospective changes in sex and relationships education; it wasn’t, the curriculum was designed to promote ‘fundamental British values’ under the new Prevent duty).

What is needed, Diamond argues, is strong leaders with good relations with local communities. Cometh the hour…

Trojan Horse, the prequel

Let’s rehearse how this all squares with his own role in theaffair as an official within the DfE drafted in to organise its response to the Trojan Horse allegations.

We know from evidence disclosed in the misconduct case brought against the senior leaders at PVET that the DfE’s Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism Unit (DDCE) were involved in the initial set of Ofsted inspections of 21 schools. They were also directly involved in the EFA inspections of PVET and Oldknow (these schools were the only ones where misconduct cases were brought against their teachers).

This preliminary focus on extremism in the planning of the inspections was denied by one of the inspectors in the hearings, but email messages prior to the inspections confirmed the active involvement of DDCE. Paragraph 124 of the Panel Hearing’s conclusions, for example, stated, “Had the emails which had recently been disclosed, and which had been shown to the Panel, been available at the time she gave evidence, the Panel considered it was reasonable to assume that, taking account of the thoroughness of the cross-examination, these emails would have been put to her to suggest that she had greater knowledge than she was prepared to admit with regard to the reasons for the inspections taking place.”

Prior to his appointment as deputy commissioner in Birmingham, Colin Diamond, on his own account, was the official at the DfE with responsibility for organising the EFA inspections. Like the inspector in her evidence to the misconduct hearing, he is also shy about the involvement of DDCE – “I was asked to pull together a team drawn from the department’s official educational adviser team (experienced school leaders and former Ofsted inspectors) who would work with Education Funding Agency staff to find out what was really going on in the PVET academies and in Oldknow Junior School following the Ofsted inspection judgements” (pages x-xi).

Diamond also fails to inform readers that the inspector involved in the two EFA investigations for which he was responsible – the one who was criticised in the Panel Hearing  conclusions – also went on to be educational adviser to Peter Clarke and drafted the sections on PVET and Oldknow in that report. So much for the idea that the different inspections and inquiries were dealing with findings arrived at separately. Moreover, they were all curated through the DDCE. Indeed, Mr Justice Philipps specifically commented (para 37) on the role of the head of the DDCE in amending the wording of the Panel judgement when quashing the case against the two teachers.

Diamond presents then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, as ‘paranoid’ about Islam. He refers to events a year earlier at Al-Madinah, a faith-designated, ‘all-through’ school in Derby. This, he says, “felt like a dress rehearsal for the events that unfolded in Birmingham in early 2014, and is significant because it appeared to prove to Gove that there was indeed a thin line between the political Islamism advocated by a minority of the Muslim population and the views of the overall Muslim population in the UK” (page 22). The school had been set up in September 2012, but was declared inadequate by October 2013. As Diamond presents the story, it went in a space of a few months from being outstanding in its first inspection after being set up, to being placed in special measures. It would turn out that it was its non-Muslim headteacher, Andrew Cutts-Mackay, who acted as a ‘whistle-blower’ against the governing body.

This was one of a number of actions against Islamic faith schools initiated by the DfE around the same time. The Ofsted report indicated serious problems of governance, while the EFA report was concerned with financial mismanagement and irregularities. Neither report indicated a prefiguring of Trojan Horse concerns with ‘political Islamism’ although there were media reports of ‘religious hardliners’, including by Richard Kerbaj and Sian Griffiths for the Sunday Times. They would go on to write the first media reports on the Trojan Horse affair. Moreover, although financial irregularities at PVET were alleged in their EFA report, none were found in a subsequent audit conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers notwithstanding it being flagged as a possible concern within the EFA report. Why, does Colin Diamond connect them?

He does not say anything about his own walk on part in the ‘dress rehearsal’ at Al-Madinah where he was part of the team seeking to find a solution. This included seeking the support of various educational bodies representing Muslim interests, which would themselves come to be discredited by Clarke. Ultimately, this initial intervention in the school proved to be unsuccessful and the DfE resolved the situation by closing the secondary school and incorporating it within Greenwood Academies Trust. It is this experience that preceded Diamond’s role in relation to the EFA inspections of PVET and Oldknow. It is disingenuous, then, for him to represent the concern with ‘political Islam’ as simply deriving from Michael Gove. It is something he also brought to his own engagement with the Trojan Horse affair and it was deeply embedded within the DfE.

I mention these connections because they are important in how Clarke approached the Trojan Horse affair under the influence of DfE ‘insiders’. The example of Al-Madinah seems to have suggested that a ‘turnaround’ at a school – from ‘outstanding’ to ‘failing’ – could happen over a matter of months and be occasioned by the government’s flagship academies programme which gave governing bodies and senior leadership teams a free hand. This scenario would seem to be crucial in the only successful prosecution, that of the acting head teacher at Oldknow who had only joined the school in April 2013.

Park View had become a ‘converter academy’ in April 2012 following an ‘outstanding’ Ofsted inspection report. It was then invited by the DfE to become a Multi Academy Trust and ‘sponsor’ two failing schools, Nansen primary in October 2012 and Golden Hillock secondary school in October 2013. This was the ‘takeover’ described in the Trojan Horse letter of November 2013 outlining an Islamist plot. Of course, the academies programme involved introducing the practices and personnel from the sponsoring school. So what was it that was problematic about Park View’s practices?

Let’s turn to chapter 5 of the Clarke Report which purports to discover the ‘ideology’ (a term taken from the 2011 Prevent Strategy) attributed to PVET and its ‘agenda’. The core of this ideology is presented across paragraphs 5.2 and 5.3:

“Rejecting not only the secular and other religions, but also other strands of Islamic belief, it goes beyond the kind of social conservatism practised in some faith schools which may be consistent with universal human rights and respectful of other communities. It appears to be a deliberate attempt to convert secular state schools into exclusive faith schools in all but name. This agenda, though not necessarily the tactics involved, appears to stem from an international movement to increase the role of Islam in education. It is supported by bodies such as the Association of Muslim Schools–UK (AMS-UK), the International Board of Educational Research and Resources (IBERR), the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the recently closed Muslim Parents Association (MPA). The movement provides practical advice and religious legitimisation to those who, in the words of the IBERR, seek to ‘Islamise the provision of educational services’. Some of the individuals who have featured in the investigation were associated with, or held positions in, these bodies.”

Notice that none of these allegations about ‘ideology’ would form part of the professional misconduct case against the senior leaders at PVET and Oldknow. But it was a framing that was being developed by the DDCE. It is part of Colin Diamond’s account of the pressures on headteacher Cutts-McKay leading to the rapid collapse of Al-Madinah after a period of initial success.

This was the script that set up expectations about what happened at PVET and, at least initially, positioned the longstanding Headteacher at Park View and Chief Executive of PVET, Lindsey Clark, as being in a similar position to Cutts-Mackay. Ms Clark was expected to describe similar pressures to those described by him. She did not; instead, she endorsed the policies and practices that she had implemented together with her Chair of Governors, Tahir Alam. And so it was that a white, atheist and feminist headteacher would be charged with being a ring leader in a plot to Islamicise schools.

Notice, too, a possible explanation of why no-one was interested in the question that animates the Serial/NYT podcast of who wrote the Trojan Horse letter. If the circumstantial evidence they set out points towards the headteacher at Adderley primary school (who was confronting a difficult HR investigation), she is positioned as potentially a ‘whistleblower’ similar to Cutts-Mackay and, thereby, in need of protection. This was so notwithstanding possible problems in her methods – as the podcast sets out, Colin Diamond was assigned that role of managing the Council’s approach to the Adderley employment tribunal, given that it remained an LA school.

School improvement

The main focus of Diamond’s book is school improvement, especially in urban areas and for working class and ethnic minority young people. His story about the lessons from Birmingham is straightforward. School improvement can be achieved, he argues, by good school governance and a proper appreciation of the cultural and religious heritages of the pupils. Birmingham schools had longstanding problems going back to the 1990s and involving problematic behaviours of parents, governors and teachers, against which some brave senior leaders had stood out, albeit with local leadership from Birmingham Council and national leadership fracturing after the acceleration of the academies programme in 2010.

But this narrative bears little weight even if it has traction within the media. Sir Michael Wilshaw was also reported in an interview with a Sunday Times journalist before stepping down as Chief Inspector of Schools, as saying that, “Birmingham city council is ‘a rotten borough … beyond redemption’, whose powers to run schools and social services should be overhauled because children are at risk … ‘the “appalling children’s services” and “awful schools” in Britain’s second largest city had been his greatest cause of concern during his five years in office. He warned that a repeat of the so-called Trojan Horse scandal, which saw a radical Islamic ethos introduced to schools in the city, was likely unless the government acted.”

The poor general state of the council’s governance was the subject of the Kerslake Report, commissioned in July 2014 with a view to its possible break-up. It deferred the matter of schooling (a part of the wider scope of children’s services) to Kershaw and Clarke, but provided a statistical analysis (in an annexe to the report) that was missing in the Clarke and Kershaw reports, which provided no data on school performance in Birmingham. Kerslake reported in December 2014 together with comparisons between Birmingham and other similar councils – among them, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle – as well as England as a whole. On all measures – poverty, unemployment, adult qualifications – it was among the worst performing councils and below the national average.

The only exception was schooling, where Birmingham had out-performed all the other councils since 2008-9 in terms of the proportion of pupils achieving at least 5 GCSEs including English and Maths and had a higher proportion of schools judged to be ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted.

In effect, by the time of the Trojan Horse affair Birmingham was a model of school improvement. Indeed, an Ofsted/Audit Commission report in 2002 had declared its school improvement policy to be outstanding. Park View had also been a failing school in 1994 when Tahir Alam became a governor and, as Chair in 1997,  appointed Lindsey Clark as headteacher. By 2006 it was judged to be one of the most improved schools in England, and in 2012 it was judged by Ofsted under Sir Michael Wilshaw’s new, more rigorous inspection regime to be ‘outstanding’ and in the top 14% of schools in England by examination results.

In fact, it was an exemplar for the government’s argument that good schools could overcome socio-economic circumstances. For example, while 15% of pupils in schools nationally received free school meals (28% in Birmingham), over 70% of pupils received them in Park View, which indicates the deprivation which many of its children experienced. While over 80% of pupils at schools nationwide spoke English as a first language (64% in Birmingham), in Park View that figure was only 7.5%, adding to the immense challenges that the school managed to overcome. But 98.8% of Park View’s pupils were from a Muslim background, and it is that fact that was most salient in representing the school as ‘risky’.

Surprisingly, Colin Diamond does not discuss how these outcomes by PVET could have been achieved, despite his mantra that good outcomes depend on good governance. We can be certain, however, that had his book been written in 2012, there would have been a chapter by Tahir Alam, or Lindsey Clark, setting out their approach (9 of his 14 contributors, including Diamond himself, have an honour for services to education; Lindsey Clark was awarded an OBE in January 2014 and was due to retire in March at around the time the Trojan Horse story broke).

There is a chapter in the book on the subsequent ‘turnaround’ success of Rockwood Academy (the re-named Park View) by the chief executive of its MAT. But the school’s achievements at GCSE in the latest data are well below that of Park View in 2012 and below the current average for Birmingham, while that of Birmingham schools, more  generally, has also declined to be at the national average.

Other of Diamond’s governance heroes have question marks against them, too. Bev Mabey, author of a chapter in the book, and Chief Executive of Washbrook Heath MAT submitted her resignation in September 2021 following an EFA investigation and report into financial irregularities at the Trust in November 2020. Diamond also cites Pat Smart, CEO of Create Trust and former headteacher at Greet Primary School in Sparkhill as a guiding spirit. Greet primary had converted to academy status in 2016, having been judged outstanding at its last Ofsted report in 2007 (it had an interim assessment in 2011 when no issues were identified). Its latest Ofsted report just prior to the book’s publication was that it ‘required improvement’. Great leaders can also experience difficulties it would seem.

Despite the fragile status of some of his exemplars, Diamond seems to have a blind spot about acknowledging the success of Park View and the good governance through which it was achieved. Nowhere is this more evident than in his editorial introduction to the chapter by Kamal Hanif, who was appointed deputy head at the school in 2003 and continued his association through to the Trojan Horse allegations – according to Diamond, Hanif “recognises the damage done by a small group of governors at the time Park View became an academy and took on responsibility for Golden Hillock and Nansen schools, which then became the epicentre of Trojan Horse” (page 32).

Hanif’s chapter describes something else, specifically the damage of the Trojan Horse affair in terms of the aftermath of accusations against teachers and governors reinforcing suspicions about Muslim teachers and governors. In addition, he describes Park View school as having been beset by racist and Islamophobic attitudes among white staff, with which the senior leaders had to contend. In contrast, he comments that, “during my time at Park View, governance was fair, free and liberal” (page 47).

Diamond allows that there was racism at the school directed against pupils and staff, but does not pause to consider how this might have been bound up with the subsequent allegations made against Muslim teachers.

White allyship?

So just what was going on at the DfE at the time of Colin Diamond’s involvement there? Why does he swither between the idea that the Trojan Horse allegations apply to a brief period when schools became academies, formally free to pursue policies separate from those of local authorities, and the idea that the problems of harassment of senior teachers by Muslim parents, governors and teachers was longstanding. Indeed, it would seem that a different longstanding problem of ethnic minority underperformance was being addressed successfully and it was being done by greater involvement of parents with their children’s schools as ostensibly promoted by the official ideology of the academies programme.

In fact, the disbelief and dismay about this improvement was not restricted to racist factions within schools, as identified by Hanif, it was also being mobilised at the DfE.  Diamond refers to a third official report on the Trojan Horse affair by Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary at the DfE, in January 2015 about what the department had known about the affair prior to 2014. This report addressed a presentation to the DfE in 2010 by a Birmingham headteacher, Tim Boyes. The latter came armed with a Policy Exchange report on ‘Faith Schools we can Believe in’.

Although the latter report addressed faith-designated schools, it argued that there was a vulnerability of schools to extremism and that the “new academies and Free Schools programmes could be exploited unless urgent measures are taken to counter extremist influence.” (page 5). It recommended the setting up of a centralised ‘Due Diligence Unit’ within the DfE to offset the consequences of outsourced functions at the DfE. As already indicated, the DfE had begun actions against Islamic faith schools, including Al-Madinah, and, with its actions against PVET and Oldknow was beginning actions against academies serving Muslim pupils.

Boyes’s presentation to the DfE began from the Policy Exchange analysis and set out how the ethnic minority presence in Birmingham had grown, together with communities increasingly living parallel lives. He also argued that activists from within the Muslim community were putting pressure on schools, through governors linked with the Muslim Council of Britain, and that there was pressure to introduce Islamic collective worship in schools. Boyes argued that there was a specific problem of Muslim-majority schools to which the answer was that “schools in the Pakistani dominated wards need to be robustly  linked, not done to, with outer schools” (ie schools serving predominantly white pupils). In other words, trusts made up of Muslim-majority schools were potentially problematic, but this could be mitigated by placing Muslim majority schools in Trusts where the other schools, including the lead school, were white-majority.

Wormald’s report did not dwell too much on the implied failures in management of the academies programme, though it did argue that the DfE had been insufficiently vigilant. It argued that a proper response had been made, namely by setting up the new Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Unit (which was further enhanced after the Trojan Horse affair). This was the very unit that came to play such an important role in managing the DfE’s response to the Trojan Horse Affair.

Notice, too, that a connection between religious difference and alleged extremism is, from this moment, instituted within the DfE. We might expect Colin Diamond to say something about the role of religion in maintained schools. Certainly, the Clarke Report seemed to be misinformed, unaware of the requirement on all schools to teach religious education and to provide daily acts of collective worship. Under local authority responsibility, both aspects – curriculum and determinations for other than Christian collective worship – are the responsibility of the local Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE). However, academy schools do not need to follow the local SACRE curriculum and their applications (or renewals) for determinations for other than Christian collective worship are made to the DfE.

For the most part, Diamond says very little about religion. He argues that a multifaith locally agreed RE syllabus is “more important than ever” (page 340), and wishes academy schools to adopt it voluntarily. The Birmingham SACRE, Diamond argues, was “one of the few local organisations to emerge with credit from Ian Kershaw’s report” (page 340). In fact, PVET continued to teach the curriculum after Park View and its associated schools became academies. Diamond seems unaware that Humanists UK, who supported whistleblowers at Park View, had also had the Birmingham SACRE in its sights for its emphasis on learning from religion, rather than about religion and not including humanists within its representation.

What about collective worship? Diamond has even less to say on the topic, but one of his contributors, Heather Knights, CEO of the National Governors Association, identifies this as a key issue, indicating that her organisation has sought the end of this requirement. However, given that it continues to remain a requirement and that Park View had had a determination for Islamic collective worship from the SACRE since 1996, it is not clear how, or why, this became such an issue. The suspicion must be that the Trojan Horse affair was a convenient means of pursuing a secularist agenda, notwithstanding that the schools were acting within the law as it currently existed.

What we do know from the misconduct hearings is that the determinations at Park View and Oldknow were due for renewal in 2013. We also know that the DfE had in place no process and no expertise for evaluating them (they initially sought advice from the SACRE). Clarke had no understanding of the legislative requirements in the area, but, as we have already seen, an idea was forming in the DfE about the problematic nature of Muslim organisations and collective worship, in part as a consequence of the Al-Madinah ‘dress rehearsal’, but also through the Policy Exchange report and Boyes’s submission to the DfE. The applications for renewal of the determinations alerted the DDCE and set in train actions to protect the academies programme from its ‘subversion’ by new converter and sponsored schools.

Two versions of what happened were parlayed. One that it represented longstanding problems in Birmingham, the second that it was a problem of newly formed academies. In truth, it was neither. The school improvement programme in Birmingham had delivered success, including the increased representation of ethnic minority and minority religious school leaders. Several chapters in the book show the reversal of that representation (Warmington, Campbell-Stephens, Iqbal) and especially of Muslim school leaders as a consequence of  the Trojan Horse affair.

Diamond’s solution is that there should be a network of partnerships connected through successful trusts to create a local system for cities that would “enable the co-construction and co-delivery of school improvement” (page 333). He describes how this was set up in Birmingham, together with Birmingham Educational Partnership (a newly-established  independent agency), the council and DfE (including the DDCE), and the Regional School Commissioner (page 334). Diamond describes himself  as a ‘White ally’ (page 350), but, perhaps unsurprisingly, what he proposes is remarkably like the solution that Tim Boyes described to the DfE in 2010. Indeed, Boyes re-emerged in 2015 as the CEO of Birmingham Educational Partnerships that sits at the centre of the local system in which BAME interests are to be nested.

Conclusion

There is one thing that all can agree on about the Trojan Horse affair. It set back school improvement in Birmingham, it undermined community schools, it reduced ethnic minority participation in leadership positions in schools, and it made the participation of ethnic minority educationalist –  whether as teachers or governors – more precarious. The official view – including that of Colin Diamond – is that these consequences should also be laid at the door of the governors and teachers associated with Park View and Oldknow. As I have shown, this is barely credible.

It is clear that the DfE believed that the problems they identified with the schools at the centre of the affair had  emerged over a short period of time after the schools became academies in 2012. In fact, there was no evidence that anything had changed and the takeover of other schools was with the approval of the DfE and the involvement of their school improvement officials. They agreed to the appointment of staff from Park View (and, in prospect, from Oldknow) into interim positions to bring about necessary change. However, the official inquiries threw up a cordon sanitaire around the DfE’s involvement similar to that which the Serial/NYT podcast found at Adderley Primary.

Instead, the DfE and BCC allowed the idea that what Colin Diamond calls ‘Trojan Horse activities’ stretched back to 1996 and earlier. In contrast, as I have shown, while the period from 1996 to 2012 was characterised by increased involvement of ethnic minority educationalists in school governance and leadership in Birmingham, it was also a period in which the school improvement programme achieved considerable success and outperformed other comparable cities. It did so against considerable hostility from white professionals as some of the contributors to Diamond’s book set out.

It would seem that it was ‘ideological extremists’ at the DfE that wrought the damaging consequences of the Trojan Horse affair. They traduced a poor Muslim community and educationalists working to secure the educational rights of its children for their own political advantage. They were aided and abetted by the media, but the main explanation of their ability to control the narrative was that, under the academies programme, education has become highly centralised with no countervailing powers. All the main agencies involved in evaluating the affair –  Ofsted, the EFA, the Clarke Inquiry and the NCTL – were agencies of the DfE. Ian Kershaw – brought in by BCC – was the Managing Director of Northern Education Ltd (a private company providing educational services). He became CEO of Northern Education multi-academy trust in October of 2014, which he left in 2017 following criticism by Ofsted of its failure to raise standards in its schools. [Article modified 04.10.22 following clarification by Mr Kershaw].

The most damaging legacy of the Trojan Horse affair is the subordination of schools to arbitrary, centralised and authoritarian power and the failure of the liberal media to hold that power to account. Colin Diamond’s book merits close reading to uncover the alternative narrative within it that cannot be suppressed – no matter how hard its editor looks away.

Note:

[1] A defence barrister in the case discusses the way in which witness statements to the Clarke inquiry were given and how they were converted into witness statements here.

John Holmwood is emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham . He is the author (with Therese O’Toole) of Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press 2018) and (with Gurminder K. Bhambra) Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (Polity 2021).

Header image credit: Wilshaw chats to pupils at Park View school. Photograph: Andrew Fox for the Guardian

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Holmwood, John 2022. ‘The Trojan Horse affair; an official’s version’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (2):

The illusion of objectivity, as revealed by the Trojan Horse affair podcast

Rehana Parveen

Before I begin this piece, I want to give a disclaimer and declare my own positionality. As a non-white academic, I am always expected to explore my own biases when I write or research on matters specific to my own faith, background or any aspect of my identity. I have not found the same level of responsibility placed on white academics to explore their own positionality.  I will return to this theme when I look to unpack what it means to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ and how this discourse of objectivity or neutrality as synonymous with whiteness has very real and very practical consequences in the Trojan Horse Affair.

However, before I get to that, I do wish to declare my own personal connections to the Trojan Horse saga.  Not only am I a Muslim from Birmingham, but I grew up in Alum Rock, one of the key areas of Birmingham embroiled in this affair. Moreover, the secondary school that I attended was Park View School. I attended Park View from 1980 to 1985. When I started my secondary education, the school was not called Park View. It was called Naseby School. In my third year it joined with Ward End Park School and was renamed Park View.

For a while many of us students were moved to the Ward End Park buildings and that is where I completed my secondary education. Mr Packer joined the school when it became Park View and he was my computer studies teacher in my 3rd year, I think. I recall I was the only girl in that class. Eventually the Ward End Park buildings would be shut down and the entire school once again based at the campus on Naseby Road. I had left Park View School by the time this final transition of the buildings took place.

I attended Park View school as a minority pupil and this was the case throughout my education there as the majority of students (and nearly all teachers) were white. I recall perhaps around 4 or 5 Muslim students in each class that were from a similar background to mine (Pakistani and Mirpuri/Pahari speaking). There were even fewer Black students. At the time even Alum Rock Road consisted mainly of white owned businesses. I would walk through  Alum Rock Road on my way to school and pass by butchers, Woolworths, Timpsons, a sewing machine shop, fish and chips shops to name a few, all of which were white owned. My parents owned one of the very few Pakistani restaurants on Alum Rock Road. When I left Park View, the demographics of that area changed, and  the ethnic and religious make up of the school also changed. Indeed, by the time our family moved out of Alum Rock it was turning into the bustling, Muslim majority area that is now familiar.

Though I would not have been able to articulate it at the time, I was well aware of my minority status at school. I was fully conscious of being different to the majority of students and also how much of myself I left outside of the classroom. I tried very hard to ensure my differences remained largely invisible as I had always thought the best way for me to fit in and progress was to ‘assimilate’; to pretend that the cultural norms of the majority applied in exactly the same way for me. I thought the differences in my life outside of school were unimportant and an inconvenience for me to mention.

For example, I recall a P.E lesson where we were expected to go running for almost the entire lesson. This was during Ramadan in the summer months and I was fasting. When I mentioned this to the teacher she had no idea what I was referring to and seemed to have little sympathy. I felt embarrassed and quickly just ended the conversation and then proceeded to participate in the lesson as though there was nothing different about me.

As an academic, I can now better understand that the invisibility that is welcomed by minimising any differences, is also the source of intense alienation; that classrooms are not neutral or objective spaces and presenting them as such masks the perspectives, values, norms and cultural behaviours of the empowered (Crenshaw 1998).

It is this notion of objectivity and neutrality that I now wish to explore in the context of two different but, in my view, overlapping themes that are addressed in the Trojan Horse Affair podcast. First, is in relation to episode 5 and the evidence of the whistleblowers. I want to unpack what this episode tells us about the way in which whiteness and white culture is made synonymous with neutrality and how difficult it becomes to challenge Islamophobic tropes when they have been embedded into the psyche and culture of our society. Our society is only at the earliest stages of unpacking its own colonial and racist legacies. The particular tropes that I am interested in exploring are the perceptions of Muslim women as illustrated by the interviews with the whistle blowers.

The second, is in the conversations between Hamza Syed and Brian Reed as they explore and address their own personal relationships to the investigations that they are conducting. Hamza’s rawness and at times emotional responses can be contrasted with Brian’s more detached approach, highlighting what I said at the beginning of this piece; that people of colour are more readily expected and indeed invested in exploring their own positionality.

I will draw these two themes together in arguing that exploring positionality is a key method of challenging biases that one may hold. Positionality, in particular allows for challenging  claims to an objective, singular, universal and natural description of the world, and to question issues related to hierarchy and power (Moghli & Kadiwal 2021). Euro-centrism and whiteness has generally evaded addressing positionality on the assumption that white culture itself represents neutrality and natural norms of behaviour.

A failure to address positionality both at an individual level and at a systemic level leads to perpetuating racist, colonial and, in the case of the Trojan Horse Affair, Islamophobic tropes. Moreover, positionality challenges the paternalistic ‘saving’ rhetoric (Moghli & Kadiwal 2021). Eurocentrism can, however, be so deeply embedded that there remains an unwillingness to reconsider the supposed neutral and objective assumptions when confronted with evidence that directly contradicts those tropes. Episode 5 captures the practical application of this theory.

The whistleblowers

In Part 5, A Study in Scarlett, we meet my former teacher, Steve Packer, and his wife, Sue Packer, the initial ‘whistleblowers’. The meeting between Hamza and Brian and the Packers begins pleasantly enough as they set out their version of events and complaints that they have made. One theme in particular emerges regarding the treatment of Muslim female students and staff by Muslim male members of staff at Park View. Sue Packer expresses her view that ‘there was a lot of unfairness going on. Equality had gone out the door’. A number of generalised claims are made about the treatment of girls and then some specific examples are provided as evidence of the removal of female agency. She further emphasises that she felt ‘the girls needed to be strong. They needed to be feel in control’ [sic].

Sue Packer recounts a particular incident when a Muslim female staff volunteer was berated by a male Muslim staff member on their return from a school outing. In Sue Packer’s view this incident was emblematic of the male/female interactions that were taking place, demonstrating a misogynistic culture which had developed in the school and which was rooted in the Islamically sanctioned religious views of the men. She regarded this incident with such seriousness that it ultimately resulted in her making a formal complaint and her subsequent resignation.

As stated in the Podcast this incident is relied upon in the evidence given by the Packers in the disciplinary hearings and the various investigations that took place. The Packers are convinced that not a single Muslim woman came forward to support their version of events because ‘the [Muslim] women aren’t very good at speaking out…. perhaps aren’t confident to speak out in that community, especially female Muslims. I think there’s just sort of fear about speaking out’

Razak (2004) poses the question of how to address patriarchy within Muslim communities without descending into the well-worn narrative of brown Muslim women needing to be saved from inherently dangerous brown Muslim men, by civilised white Europeans (see also, Spivak 1988). Unfortunately, this framing seems to be exactly what we see on display in this episode and indeed running throughout the investigations. Essentialised and reductive notions of Muslim women are presented thereby justifying them being ‘saved’, reinforcing the notions of superiority of the saviours (Abu-Lughod 2002).

It is particularly troubling that, for the whistleblowers, having worked with Muslims students and staff over a very lengthy period of time and, indeed, in the case of Steve Packer, actively participated in some of the changes that were made to support the environment for Muslim students, the perceptions of Muslim women remained resolutely one dimensional. They steadfastly remained convinced that female Muslim staff and students were unable to speak for themselves and needed them to be speak on their behalf.

The Podcast highlights that not a single Muslim female from the school came to testify in support of the claims made by them and yet when challenged on this the only conclusion that they can draw is that the women are unable to speak for themselves; reinforcing the assumptions that they already hold and reinforcing their own virtuous goal of speaking on behalf of muted Muslim women. There appears to be little re-assessment or reflection having taken place over the years since the Trojan Horse Affair, as to any other possible reasons why their allegations received so little support from the women whose interests they claimed to represent.

This critique is not limited to the whistleblowers. Ann Connor, an inspector from the Education Funding Agency Report on Park View Educational Trust and Education Advisor to the Clarke Report had spoke to female Muslim students at Park View School as part of the former review. In giving her evidence she referred to her notebook in which she had noted the fierce and challenging questions that she had been met with by the students. Yet this did not feature in her assessment and nor did this allay her concerns. The framing of Muslim women is so deeply embedded that even when it is forcefully challenged it does not appear to make any impact on those tropes unless Muslim women surrender their faith.

I would argue these are all examples of failing to address one’s own positionality. When one assumes they hold the objective, neutral position there is no need to reflect on one’s own location in the geopolitics of knowledge production. Nor is it necessary to consider one’s own complicity in preconceived notions that you hold, nor to attempt to counter those notions, nor to consider how your own views of the world may be shaped by Eurocentric thought, knowledge and power structures (Moghli & Kadiwal 2021). One can remain safe in the assumed comfort that you hold the ‘normal’, ‘neutral’, ‘secular’ position that is untainted by any historical, colonial, political or social context.

Abu-Lughod argues a more productive approach for those seeking to address inequalities is to ask questions as to how we may contribute to a more just society and to think of egalitarian forms of alliances, coalitions and solidarity rather than salvation (Abu-Lughod). This requires giving space to Muslim women, listening to them, recognising they do not all speak in one voice, recognising the significance of faith and the different ways in which faith manifests itself for the women, and acknowledging all the complexities and nuances that this brings.

In my view everyone engages with the world around them through their own particular lens and through their own complex locations. The danger arises when you fail to or refuse to acknowledge that whiteness and Eurocentrism is not a neutral space.

Hamza Syed’s exploration of his own positionality

Throughout the Podcast we see Hamza grappling with his own positionality and the impact this has on his investigations. The very first episode begins with Hamza locating himself within the geographical, political and social context of the letter. Hamza makes it clear from the outset that the consequences of the letter were of significance to him personally as a British Muslim from Birmingham.  Indeed, in Part 6, a member of the Humanist Society almost nonchalantly asks about the Trojan Horse Affair: ‘what impact did it have?’ Hamza’s impassioned reaction demonstrates the deep, lasting and very significant effect that has been felt by Muslims including Hamza himself and Hamza does not hide his emotions or his anger at the casual manner in which the question is asked. 

At various stages of the investigations we see much deeper reflections from Hamza in which he not only reflects on his own positionality but we see him engaging in reassessments of his own identity and his role as journalist. Again, in Part 6, reference is made to an incident in which Hamza sets out his own truthful personal views in a letter to potential witnesses in order to allay concerns and to reassure them as to his takes on the entire affair.

What I find interesting is that Hamza’s openness in revealing the positions that he takes is seen as so problematic. I understand a need to have an open mind when investigating but Hamza’s disclosure of his positionality simply makes clear the lens through which he is approaching the investigation? It recognises that he is part and parcel of the community that has been impacted, it allows for the reflections and analysis that take place, it allows for the different perspectives that he brings to the claims. I would go so far as to say that had Hamza not been a Muslim from Birmingham this entire investigation and podcast would never have been created. It even leads to reflections on the part of Brian of his role as a journalist and the supposed objective place from which he approached journalism.

Conclusion

It is a well-established in decolonial and post-colonial theory that exploring positionality is one of the methods through we can challenge claims to objectivity and neutrality. But exploring positionality is not just for those of us from ethnic or Black minorities. We are already fully invested in undertaking that work. Where we need to move to is for ‘whiteness’ and euro-centric to being unpacking its political, social, historical and geographical contexts in values and norms that it espouses.

For me personally, so much of Hamza’s reflections resonated with my approach to my academic work and the Podcast has given me renewed hope that Muslims and people of colour more generally need to be active in every public space and to reclaim what is seen as objective, neutral or normal.

References:

Abu-Lughod, Lila (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativisms and Its Others’ American Anthropoligist, 104(3) 783-790.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé ‘Towards a Race-Conscious Pedagogy in Legal Education’, National Black Law Journal 11(1)

Moghli, Mai Abu and Laila Kadiwal, (2021) ‘Decolonising the curriculum beyond the surge: Conceptualisation, positionality and conduct’, London Review of Education 19(1)

Razack, Sherene H. (2004)  ‘Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages’, (2004) Feminist Legal Studies 12: 129-174.

Rehana Parveen is a former solicitor and a former senior tutor at The University of Law. Rehana joined the University of Birmingham Law School in 2012 and completed her doctoral thesis exploring Muslim women’s experiences of using religious tribunals (shari’a councils) and comparing this to their experiences of using state law. Rehana currently works as a Senior Lecturer in the Law School, teaching on a wide range of undergraduate and post graduate modules. Rehana is particularly interested in the developing relationship between English Family Law and Islamic Family Law and how women navigate these interacting frameworks. More recently Rehana has been exploring how legal concepts and structures may be decolonised to place them within their social, historical, political and postcolonial context.

Header Image Credit:

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Parveen, Rehana 2022. ‘The illusion of objectivity, as revealed by the Trojan Horse Affair podcast’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (2): 

Underclass in Purdah: Britain’s never-changing relationship with its Asian Muslims and the creation of the Asian Muslim

Fatima Rajina

The Trojan Horse Affair podcast, produced by Serial Productions, has reignited a conversation on the long-standing effects of the hoax and its impact on the Muslim community in east Birmingham as well as the wider British Muslim community. The podcast did many things: for some, it re-opened old wounds, while, for others, it provided clarity and a form of vindication; a vindication that has been long denied as a result of the War on Terror and its associated  rhetoric and logic where Muslims either had to be with ‘them’ (the alleged organisers of the Islamist plot), or stand firmly against them.

For me, it laid bare the truth of what happened, how it happened and how a whole narrative had been intentionally constructed to vilify the Muslim community. I was doing my fieldwork for my PhD in Tower Hamlets at the time where the very same journalists who reported on Birmingham were attempting to concoct a similar narrative about the schools in this London borough. In this regard, Syed and Reed’s revelations about the Trojan Hoax embodied the state’s roused hunger to relentlessly hunt Muslims and punish them punitively wherever they may be a significant majority and have access to some local power.

The podcast succinctly articulated the inner machinations at play during the Trojan Horse affair, which many Muslims were already aware of, even if this was denied by key players. Its thorough and critical investigation is what provided some solace, a form of reckoning. However, Serial’s legitimate questions around the affair were met with silence from the media class and the political class. The lack of engagement from the government with the facts and questions raised in the podcast was duly noted, particularly from individuals like Michael Gove, who during the Trojan Hoax was the Education Minister.

Although I could write and dissect much more about the podcast and its reception, I would like to think about a documentary cited in the podcast. In the first episode, Tahir Alam, former chair of governors at Park View Academy, and Moz Hussain, the first Muslim teacher to be employed at the school, mention the BBC Panorama documentary provocatively titled Underclass in Purdah broadcast in 1993. Tahir Alam explains how this documentary captured his attention, mainly focusing on the academic underachievement of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Bradford and Birmingham with a specific focus on the Pakistani community. One of the two schools featured was Park View, the school that Tahir Alam had himself attended.

Tahir Alam has this to say to Hamza Syed, one of the presenters of the podcast, about the documentary and how it made him feel:

“Archived recording: But for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, an astonishing 50% hold no qualifications whatsoever.

Hamza Syed: 50%, half of us, were basically failing school. That hit Tahir hard.

Tahir Alam: That the extent of education failure was so bad that we were at risk of creating an underclass of Muslims, who were, basically, uneducated, prone to crime and unemployment.

So I kind of sat there, and it made me feel guilty, actually, guilt because I was one of the few people who made it from my family, one of the first ones to make it to university and to have a good job and so on.

But there was also a sense of humiliation, really, because I was from this community.”

(The Trojan Horse Affair Podcast, Serial Productions, 2022: episode 1)

It was this that stirred him to push for educational reform in Alum Rock, his east Birmingham neighbourhood, home to a large Pakistani community. As a result, he became an avid advocate for raising the educational aspirations of young Muslims in Alum Rock and giving them access to opportunities that were hitherto unavailable to them.

The Asian or Muslim Asian?

The most striking element about Underclass in Purdah is the title itself. But, before I come back to it, I will provide a brief overview of the documentary and its alleged insights. The documentary claims to widely explore the economic and educational experiences of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Bradford and Birmingham though much of the focus is on the Pakistani community across the two cities, with a few minutes given to explaining differences with the Bangladeshi communities. Nonetheless, the documentary feebly characterises the two communities’ supposed failures and juxtaposes them against the wider Indian and East African Asian communities.

The presenter of the show, Nisha Pillai, a South Asian of Indian descent, bizarrely introduces the documentary with the following line:

“The stereotype “Asian” is the hardworking businessman or doctor doing well for himself [sic] but for the majority of Muslim Asians, that stereotype is a myth. A new generation of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, potentially the biggest ethnic group in the country, is growing up angry and alienated from white society. In tonight’s programme, we lift the veil on this new underclass.”

‘South Asian’, it should be pointed out, is a category that signifies very little. However, even when it is flattened despite its multitude of languages, cultures, customs, clothing, religion and much more, the term evokes a set of imageries and narratives of ‘a people’ to the average person. Indeed, this signifier is as dynamic as any other, but the deeply ingrained habits of perception are why such collapsing is made possible. Having noted that, though, where we notice a shift and a deviation from the term, especially in this documentary, is the continuous use of ‘Muslim Asians’. This category alludes to the material and political circumstances of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.

The repurposing of ‘Asian’ taps into a different set of established fears, particularly around the Muslim. It facilitates, heightens and inflates the importance of how ‘these Muslims are a menace’. At the same time, those who are non-Muslim who hail from the same geographical region are placed in a unique position: to uphold the boundaries of what makes a good ‘other’ citizen. This became ever more defined following the Northern mill town uprisings in the summer of 2001 where ‘…Hindu and Sikh activists had published warnings against the dangers of Islam’ (Bagguley and Hussain 2008: 55) and that those participating were all Muslim Asian boys and men (read: not our boys!). Kundnani elaborates on how such mixed-class snobbery from non-Muslim Asians, especially The World Council of Hindus, came out to publicly ‘disown the Muslim rioters, hoping to make clear to whites that Hindus should not be tarnished with the same brush. Asian solidarity had died’.

It is important to note that although these events happened in 2001, a similar tone is utilised to demarcate the apparent splintering along religious lines in Underclass in Purdah. The example used in the 1993 documentary was the Salman Rushdie Affair and the burning of effigies by some Muslims. Again, the emphasis here was that the Asian Muslims are the trouble-makers while the non-Muslim Asian, rather insipidly, ought to be rewarded and not be infringed upon with the diatribe of Muslim Asians. The Muslim Asian becomes the pariah, expunged into a permanent pathologised frame, corresponding with the tropes and fear-mongering employed by the Trojan Hoax.

Underclass in Purdah – a pathologisation

It is essential to consider the language deployed to discuss Muslims, and here the title of the documentary warrants some attention. Purdah, in its most basic definition, means curtain in Farsi. Within the social context, it refers to the socio-religious and cultural practice of South Asian women, primarily Hindu and Muslim women, secluding themselves through their sartorial choices in ensuring their skin is covered and concealed, including their body form. The practice of purdah also extends to the physical segregation of men and women. Importantly, purdah is also a term used within the UK political landscape before any election to emphasise the specific restrictions while canvassing.

Mobeen Hussain, who focuses on colourism and practices of skin-lightening and examined how bodies were racialised in colonial South Asia, however, argues that the historical practice of purdah went ‘far from fitting into binary narratives of veiling/unveiling and traditional and primitive versus modern and progressive’ but that they were ‘often about navigations of space, familial hierarchies, and changing public roles’ (Hussain 2021: 163). Its use in the documentary title implies that this underclass, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, are in hiding. They are yet to appear in society. The ominous accompanying music also adds to this tension of why these communities are ‘unwilling’ to get themselves out of poverty and why they continue adhering to their ‘strange’ customs, locating the responsibility on those impacted by the structural violence.

The primary problem with the way the two communities are (re)presented is that they are projected as inherently lacking the desire to want change and achieve good grades or give their children a good life. Yet we witnessed how Alam transformed the schools by paying attention to the particular needs of young Muslims in schools in east Birmingham and raising their aspirations, as previously this was non-existent:

‘The racism was pervasive. Razwan Faraz, a former governor and math teacher, says at one of his first governing body meetings, he was shown a list of places the students had been given work placements through a program at the school. And it was all restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores.’The Trojan Horse Affair Podcast, Serial Productions, 2022: episode 1

In the documentary, though, there is no treatment of structural factors with much of the focus on the families alone and their choices. There is also little recognition of meeting the needs of the young Muslims, articulating the claim that they are making it difficult to ‘escape the ghetto’. The families are captured through a monolithic pattern, thereby pathologising them. For example, in the scenes with Muslim women, they are presented as passive individuals who are not invested in their children’s future but are bound by their customs and adhering to their men’s commands.

McLoughlin affirms this by noting how the documentary’s structure alludes ‘to an essentialist set of assumptions about Muslim Asian women as necessarily the confined bearers of traditional izzat (family honour) and sharm (shame) in contradistinction to the goals of a democratic and secular society.’ (McLoughlin 1998: 91). This perfectly illustrates the limits of thinking about the Muslim Asian woman, of continuously relying on prescribed, orientalist-induced workings. These racist fantasies are on repeat within the cultural and political terrain and determined how the political and media class discussed the Trojan Hoax. In the podcast, we hear references made by Sue Packer in episode 5 about her concerns about young Muslim women, including her colleagues, and that they were culturally and religiously trapped, and she wanted to facilitate a way out for them.

As ever, when there are stories specifically about racially minoritised communities, there will always be those from within those communities who present themselves as the alternative. Those who have proven capable of proper, unweird human behaviour (read: leveraging a proximity to whiteness) and substituting the usual patterns of consumption to ‘help’ those left behind. Such individuals project a vilification of the Muslim Asian that is a different form of violence to reassert their sense of awakening, of holding a superior position. The Panorama documentary deliberately seems to avoid discussing, and I would argue is a glaring omission, how there is little discussion around the de-industrialisation of the cities these Asian Muslims are in. The lack of economic opportunities is a critical factor because we see this raised in multiple scenes, including the one where a burglar is interviewed who discusses the lack of opportunities available that pushes many to turn to criminal activities.

The tenuous attempts to link the ‘anger and alienation’ felt by young Muslim Asian men to essentialist cultural behaviours are fraught. Addressing the current political and social imaginings during and following the Trojan Hoax, the Muslim Asian bears an arbitrary sense of justice. What I mean by this is how the sheer fear that reverberated within the political class, abetted by the media class, was all willing to sacrifice the Muslim to legitimate the ever-expansive surveillance apparatus. After all, the Muslim, especially the body of the Asian Muslim man, is ostensibly the site through which the national identity and image are asserted. Such exclusionary practices were a way for non-Muslim Asians to part ways with their peers.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the documentary provides a shallow analysis for several reasons: firstly, the diluting of the structural; secondly, the over-reliance on crude, essentialist framings of the Muslim borrowed from colonial vernacular in conjunction with using purdah nefariously, including the idea that the documentary aims to ‘lift the veil’ of these communities. The Asian Muslim’s positioning has changed very little since the release of Underclass in Purdah with a more intensified hyper-vigilance and focus on this subject. Its claims are deeply grounded in historical and contemporary (re)configurations of the Asian Muslim who requires regular intervention by the state. This imagining activates the need to brazenly unveil these communities to make them whole, to learn to embody civility and enter modernity. The inferring is that the Asian Muslim simply cannot, and will not, escape their ‘cultural trappings’.

The documentary ends with a quote by the Carlton Bolling College headteacher, Mervyn Flecknoe, that ‘our city centres will become as difficult as American city centres’. This analogy posits the idea that the violence is outsourced to these otherwise progressive cities by outsiders, the internally racialised ‘other’. These impenetrable anxieties around the Asian Muslim defy any pragmatism. The discourse has remained stagnant, and even with the podcast exposing the affair as a hoax again, the lethargic non-response remains, particularly in Birmingham. The lack of engagement or even acknowledgement of an error actually serves to heighten the dismembering of the Asian Muslim. The Asian Muslim is either hypervisible or remains invisible. The caricaturing of the Asian Muslim as an underclass, requiring a necessary intervention to make them unhidden, exposed means their mere existence haunts the imagination of the state. Whether hypervisible or invisible, the Muslim occupies the mind of the oppressor. In this regard, the disciplining of Muslims, through whatever means possible, will endure in the long run.

References:

Bagguley, P., & Hussain, Y. (2008). Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain (1st ed.). Routledge.

Hussain, A. M. (2021). Race, Gender, and Beauty in Late Colonial India c.1900-1950. (Doctoral thesis). , p.163.

McLoughlin, S. (1998). ‘An underclass in Purdah?’ Discrepant representations of identity and the experiences of young-British-Asian-Muslim-women. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 80(3), pp.89-106. DOI:

Fatima Rajina is a Legacy in Action Research Fellow at the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University. After completing her MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures at SOAS, she went on to do a PhD after successfully securing a Nohoudh Scholarship with the Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS, University of London. Completing her PhD at SOAS, Fatima’s work looks at British Bangladeshi Muslims and their changing identifications and perceptions of dress and language. She has also worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge looking at police and counter-terrorism. Fatima was also a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, Research Fellow at UCL IoE, and, additionally, she worked as a Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University London.

Header Image Credit: Alum Rock Road, Birmingham, K. Khan

Bio Image Credit: Ellie Kurttz

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Rajina, F. 2022. ‘Underclass in Purdah: Britain’s never-changing relationship with its Asian Muslims and the creation of the Asian Muslim’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (2):

The Social Life of Agriculture: History Passes into Setting

Rowan Jaines

In the mid-sixteenth century, William Herbert the Earl of Pembroke expelled villagers from long standing settlements on the boundary of his estate. Herbert had a vision of an arcadian country park, landscaped in the vision of a bucolic and well-ordered England, ruled over by a noble upper class. To achieve this vision, the labourers in the village just outside the estate were ordered to leave. 

In anger at their expulsion from their homes, the villagers invaded the park. In retaliation Herbert travelled to his Welsh  estates and ordered an army of tenants whom he marched to Pembroke. This army, at Herbert’s order, hunted and slaughtered the invading villagers leaving the grounds clear for the development of a harmonious and beautiful country park (Wood, 2007).

A generation later Herbert’s son Henry married Mary Sidney, whose brother Philip Sidney wrote ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’. The pastoral images in this book, inspired not only by Herbert’s estate but also by his political philosophy, defined literary depictions of the English countryside for the next two centuries, influencing writers from Shakespeare to John Milton.

Monocultural arrangements

This category of territory; the rural, the pastoral, the agricultural, the arable, or the countryside – is slippery, never fully or accurately described by any of its possible names. Neither reducible to, nor attainable by discourse, the very act of agricultural production is always simultaneously, over and underdetermined. The monocultural arrangement, by which I mean, the tending of a crop within a delimited space, whilst creating a hostile environment for all other life, can be understood as a counter transcendental category.  It literally embodies the immanence of existence in its emphatically mundane, earthbound, and corporeal form. It is the site that shows the field of force between nature – at once a tyrant and a martyr – and sovereign power, the rule of bounded territory.

Sociology was created and named as a discrete discipline in 1838 by the French philosopher of science, Albert Comte. This initial vision was of a positivistic science of social life, using, mainly urban focused experiments and observations to understand the behaviour of ‘society’.  The idea of ‘society’ as a delimited, bounded entity is analogous to, and in part generated by, the conception of the city-state. This urban environment was named the polis by ancient Greek thinkers of the 4th century BCE, most notably Plato and Aristotle.

In short, since the birth of the ‘political philosophy’ the urban has been imagined as the situated body of society. This is a model of thinking that obscures the relational significance of rural life. The ancient Greek polis was distinguished from other types of community through the presence of distinct activities, such as: commercial exchange, judicial proceedings, and public deliberation. These systems imagined arable land as part of the polis, rather than its life sustaining force.

Standard accounts of the history of sociology see the roots of the discipline as originating in classical Greek thought, and this theoretical orientation has provided many of the bases of the social analyses of ‘classical’ sociologists such as Emile Durkheim. Contemporary sociologist Mark Shucksmith (2010) has raised the issue that the agency of people in rural areas frequently goes not only unnoticed but is actively neglected in sociological research. Rural areas are understood, even in contemporary research, as lacking in ‘social life’. In other words, by imagining the urban as the location of ‘society,’ the sociological discipline has neglected some fundamental conceptual problems.  Pivotally, the place of the rural in the social whole.

It seems we have forgotten the fundamental importance of agricultural operations to social life, even as forces of production diversify.  Mid twentieth century mechanisms for understanding rural life were derivative rather than critical or radical. Indeed, the first annals of the Rural American Sociological Society published in 1936, made the case for a rural sociology which viewed agriculture as a ‘primitive’ mode of production.

This first issue is revealing, its analysis of agricultural communities labelled them foetal cities and the postcolonial indigenous rural community “parasitic” (Zimmerman et al 1936).  In this paper, the scholars identify a rural site which had been colonised by European settlers who had moved on after having altered the ecosystem entirely through monocultural farming practises, and the commodification of the land. In doing so, the earlier settlers had alienated the Indigenous population. Despite this, the authors of this paper, characterised the Indigenous population as parasitic, because they received government assistance. 

In sum, the early attempts of rural sociology to understand the countryside, are bound up with the same Kantian flaws that have provoked criticism within the medical sciences and the associated disciplines of anthropology and geography. Kant follows the Aristotelian project in imagining a hierarchy of beings in which the white male body, and the urban site appear as ‘most developed’. The early development of rural sociology suggests that the corporeal body is separate to psychic life. The body here is understood as a phenomena synonymous with the rural, the physical manifestation of common ancestry and inheritable traits that are perpetuated through generations; the life of the mind on the other hand, is imagined as an urban phenomena, a cultural category of being that is capable of transcending and overcoming corporeal constraints.

The rural as an analytical category

There is an alternative way of interrogating the rural as a site of social life. Instead of imagining the rural and the urban as two poles on an evolutionary spectrum – we might instead imagine the city as always shot through with the agricultural. When conceived of in this manner, agriculture is neither a starting point, nor an end destination – it is rather an interminable force, a relationship with nature that is reproduced within social and political life.  When we think of commodities, this task is fairly simple: of course plants make up 80 per cent of the food that humans on the planet eat and of course they are grown in farmers fields, and of course they are sold to people in the city. The task gets more difficult as we begin to think about philosophical, economic and political products and issues. It is nevertheless an important task, enabling us to see assumptions about the rural afresh.

Long before Aristotle and Plato, in the 8th century BCE, the philosopher farmer Hesiod in Works and Days  warned that the life of the polis sails upon the sea of a dangerous and unstable nature. A farm, Hesiod explained, is a part of nature that human beings take as their own and try to direct towards expedient ends. Humans cannot however, control the movements of nature within their bounded plot. The agricultural field is not understood as a tamed patch of earth by Hesiod. It is rather the site where we can see in action the relationship between human social organisation and the dis-ordered, chaotic force of nature (Nelson and Greene, 2002).

For Hesiod this is a bond that is at once co-operative and hostile. Nature is the force that both causes the crop to grow and destroys the self-same crop, through the actions of insects, diseases and storms. The farmer can perceive nature’s actions but cannot control its force entirely – even with the best planning. It is here, I propose, in the relationship between society’s need for food and the untamable earth that a radical rural sociology may emerge. This requires an understanding of the world that does not see human life and subjectivity as having primacy even within human society- indeed within sociology.

The pre-Aristotelian theory of arable land found in Hesiod’s Works and Days suggest that rather than being distinct from social life, the organisation of ‘nature’ that is used in arable arrangements is always indelibly entwined with the management of human life.  The arable field is the ground on which we find the dialectic between history and necessity, autonomy and nature. In the following section I consider the dual issues of land ownership and food production and explore the conspicuous absence of the rural from English public knowledge and the UK’s democratic tradition.

The rural is haunted

In the opening scene of Caryl Churchill’s (1983) play Fen, a Japanese businessman “Mr Takai” introduces the audience to this specific landscape in which, he explains, he hopes to invest his money and in which the audience will invest their time for the duration of the drama. Mr Takai explains that this land was once underwater. The Fens squirmed with fish and eels in reed-ridden currents until; “In 1630 rich lords planned to drain the Fen, change swamps into grazing land, far thinking men, brave investors.”

The Fen people, he continues, had “no vision”. They claimed to be content with their writhing mire and actively opposed the drainage. Despite this, for Mr Takai, the story ends happily ever after; “In the end” he tells the audience “we have this beautiful earth. Very efficient, flat land, ploughs right up to the edge, no waste”.

Mr Takai’s monologue describes a Fen community which is intractable and aggressively resistant to progress. In his account the Fen-dwellers are less than human, ignorant and indolent in the face of technological progress; – “they refused to work on the drainage, smashed dykes, broke sluices” he tells the audience.

From Mr Takai’s prospector’s viewpoint both landscape and history are broken into parcels of investment, arranged in a logical movement forward, but the bounded space of the stage allows Churchill to counter this narrative. Using temporal slips and spectral traces the audience is made aware that this progress narrative is dependent on myriad omissions, or perhaps more precisely, repressions. Ghosts walk upon the stage.

The labour of working-class bodies and the land itself only feature in Mr Takai’s narrative at the point in which they threaten to interrupt material accumulation. The compliance of labouring bodies is framed as natural within this temporal schema. The ghosts who appear on stage during Fen expose the violence of this myth, for example the spectre of an unknown woman appears and tells Tewson the farmer, that she is starving and that ‘you bloody farmers could not live if it was not for the poor, tis them that keep you bloody rascals alive.’ At the end of the play, the character Val who has died in the final scenes returns as a ghost and recounts tales of violence that namelessly bleed across temporal boundaries.  ‘I can’t keep them out’ Val cries as unseen spectres proliferate around her: ‘Her baby died starving, she died starving, who?’. These ghosts act as both the sign and effect of voices displaced from history because the recognition of these experiences would disrupt the claim of history as progress.

The agricultural labourer, like the midwife, is a constant social form that appears across history and geography.  (I make a distinction here between the labourer and the farmer, though some farmers are also labourers on their own land, not all make this connection with the soil and vegetative matter.)  In the richest as well as the poorest of countries, seed needs to be sown, stones need to be picked, and produce harvested. Despite myriad technological advances this is one job, that like the midwife has remained a constant reminder of mortality and human dependence upon the physical realm. Long before companies like Uber and Just Eat combined the gig economy model with mobile technology, the shifting seasonal demands of agriculture meant that short-term and ‘payment by task’ labour relations were standard practice.

In the East of England during the agrarian revolution, service providers called ‘Gangmasters’ provided landowners and farmers with workers at peak times. These labourers, have through history been ‘non-citizen’ individuals, people without suffrage or rights, many who are ‘just’ legal enough to pass inspection, many who are not.  In the late 19th century this population was made up of children and traveller and gypsy communities as well as the rural poor. In the mid 20th century gangmasters used the labour of rural working-class women.

After the expansion of the European Union in 2004, a web of employment agencies began to operate between some of the poorest areas of a newly expanded Europe and the furthest back waters of the rural UK. Modern slavery emerged in the small market towns that punctuate wide rural expanses in places like Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. The figure of the agricultural labourer is the image par excellence of the labour that underpins the formal choreography of alienation – it is in rural social organisation that political forces and agri-technology constellate, always in motion and in relationship. The study of the arable is not a side pursuit, rather it anticipates and helps us grasp the dark present.

Agricultural oligopsony

In our present moment the horrors of the impending climate crisis appear in the interminable cycle of twenty-four-hour news across multiple devices. We find ourselves standing in the nexus of myriad ‘monocultural arrangements’ – precisely management systems that use technology to resist diversity and contingency. In these systems more and more of the same is produced. Human use of natural resources to produce goods currently affects more than 70% of the global, ice-free land surface. Between one quarter to one third of this available land is used by society for the primary production of food, feed, fibre, timber and energy.

This is a situation that came to fruition during the twentieth century, though it has a longer pre-history. Data shows that since 1961 global population growth and changes in consumption patterns have together caused unprecedented rates of land and freshwater use. Agriculture currently accounts for two thirds to three quarters of global fresh-water use. Areas under agriculture and forestry have expanded dramatically during this period and have contributed to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and widespread loss of natural ecosystems and biodiversity.

About a quarter of the Earth’s ice-free land area is currently subject to human-induced degradation. Soil takes a long time to form and conventional farming practises are eroding the soil at a rate more than 100 times faster than the soil formation rate. Drought and desertification are becoming steadily more commonplace. In 2015, the UN estimated that around 500 million people lived within areas which experienced desertification between the 1980s and 2000s. The effects of climate change and land degradation disproportionately affects areas in the Global South, and this process is resulting in exponential loss of diversity, and impending food crises in areas such as South and East Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.  

Since the mid twentieth century the incessant production of more of the same has been facilitated by the limited attention given to the social and economic arrangements of rural communities and land use. This is a form of alienation that leads to the acceptance of apocalyptic events as everyday inconveniences, whilst simultaneously we accept day to day conveniences in return for climacteric conditions – the interminable by-product of splitting of the sensuous form from value.

Land ownership remains a key underpinning component of rural land use. Property rights are used to control the way that land is used or not used in rural areas and this has implications for sustainable development, resilience and ecosystem services. In the United Kingdom the right to private property is central to the idea of citizenship and trumps the right to public knowledge regarding the use of land. This becomes particularly pertinent when considered through the lens of agricultural land, because data protection laws mean that it is often impossible to find out which areas of land are home to specific crops and farming practices.  Due to privacy laws concerning land, particularly inherited land, knowledge about the production and economics of agriculture in the UK has long been obscured. Much of the history of rural policy and practice can be understood as a struggle between the rights and privileges of private landowners and state intervention in the public interest. These tussles have however, produced far less change than at one time seemed inevitable.

When it comes to land ownership, the UK is currently a more unequal country than Brazil – where there are regular land riots. In Europe only Spain is more unequal in terms of land ownership than the UK, through the maintenance of land patterns imposed by General Franco’s fascist regime.  English land ownership laws themselves date back to 1066 when William the Conqueror claimed all of England for the Crown, then leased estates to lords and nobles, who in turn leased the land to tenants and farmers. Today, England and Wales remain among the last countries on earth which continue these ancient patterns of landownership. Because these hereditary estates make up a large portion of the UK’s agricultural land, this means that the machinations of political and economic systems are obscured within UK food production and farming.

It is almost impossible to work out the extent of the assets and political influence enjoyed by the UK’s largest land owning families.  Whilst all land in England and Wales is required to be registered at Her Majesty’s Land Registry following any significant change in title, this does not apply to land that has not changed hands since registration was made compulsory. The Land Registry currently estimates that 20% of the land mass in England and Wales remains unregistered: most of this unregistered property is rural land.  Accurate statistics on the identity of landowners and the nature of land holding in the UK are therefore very difficult to produce. The aristocratic landowners exercise a huge amount of control over rural England. British land ownership and agricultural subsidies have been painstakingly kept out of the public eye by successive governments under the duress of the House of Lords. This is the non-elected arm of the British parliamentary system which is still dominated by hereditary peers whose families form the English land-owning class – referred to variously as the aristocracy or the nobility.

In 2016 Unearthed – an investigative journalism project run by the environmental organisation Greenpeace – ran an investigation into the top 100 recipients of direct EU farming subsidies. They found that UK hereditary land- owners as a group, received a total of £87.9m in agricultural subsidies in 2015, of which £61.2m came from the single payment scheme – this is more than was paid to the bottom 55,119 recipients in the single payment scheme combined.

The payments take up the vast majority of the farming subsidy pot. At least one in five of these single payments went to businesses owned or controlled by members of aristocratic families, including; the present Lord Rothschild (also known as a previous BSkyB director and the long-term friend of the monocultural media mogul Rupert Murdoch), and the Conservative MP Richard Drax.  Rumoured to be the UK’s richest parliamentarian, Mr Drax has a fortune that exceeds £150 million. Much of this wealth was accumulated through his family’s sugar plantation in Barbados established in the seventeenth century and run using slave labour for over two hundred years.

Richard Drax has consistently used his family’s wealth and his resultant position in the House of Lords to restrict support, education and individual freedoms to working people, as well as voting against environmental and democratic measures. This organisation of the landowning aristocracy and privilege of private property, is a germinate gem that has refracted, bent the force of the farmers field into another oblique source of force.  The global agri-food system can trace its origins back to the last quarter  of  the  19th  century  in  Britain,  which was then the world’s  dominant commercial power. In our current moment, although our supermarket shelves burst with culinary variety, the production, supply, and distribution of food is increasingly pooling in a handful of corporations, most notably in the hands of Associated British Foods, Cargill, Unilever and Nestle.

This pooling of force creates a dual process. On one hand these corporations operate an oligopoly—precisely a market with a small number of sellers; on the other, they also control an oligopsony – a market with few buyers. It is not only hard to grow grain, it is now difficult to sell it as well. Tenant farmers and other non- landowning agricultural workers grow poorer and less powerful each year. Max Weber’s (1918) classic definition of the state describes ‘a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,’ we have forgotten that issues regarding the production and distribution of food are a primary source of force and its uses.  Colonialism is usually understood in terms of the establishment of rule over a distant territory and the control of its people. However, the arable shows how colonial organisation grounds, founds, and exceeds itself ‘at home’ in the farmer’s field. 

Towards a radical rural?

The rural holds the accrued material of centuries of political and legal domination over subordinate people, the exploitation of human and natural resources and the construction of racial and cultural differences that privilege the nobility over the populations they rule. In other words, by identifying the urban as the primary site of social life we have understood the fruit of our social organism as the ‘evolved’ or ‘cooked’ form rather than as part of a wider organic form.

Put a different way, the rural does not underlie the city in an evolutionary manner. Society cannot evolve beyond the requirement of the organised production of food, and this need cannot be met predictably over a long term due to the inherent inconsistencies of natural forces. In other words, the foundation that the rural provides for the urban is always unstable and inconsistent.

In our current moment, economic and political spheres increasingly congeal in petrified unrest. Yet it is in the arable that the forces of nature that may provide an unsettling drama to halt the production of more of the same. Nature is frequently violent, and always generative.

References

Churchill, C. (1990) Plays 2:”Softcops”; “Top Girls”; “Fen”; “Serious Money”. London: Methuen World Classics.

Nelson, S., & Grene, D. (2008). God and the Land: the Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shucksmith, M. (2010). Disintegrated rural development? Neo‐endogenous rural development, planning and place‐shaping in diffused power contexts. Sociologia ruralis, 50(1), 1-14.  

Weber, M.  (2004). ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in Owen, D. S., & Strong, T. B. The vocation lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Wood, A. (2007) The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zimmerman, C. C., Useem, J. H., & Zeigler, L. H. (1936). Littleville: a Parasitic Community During the Depression. Rural Sociology, 1(1), 54.

Rowan Jaines is an ESRC sponsored doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at The University of Sheffield. Her thesis Landscapes of Discontent: Petrified Unrest in the Fens of Eastern England interrogates the Fen region as site that reveals the discontinuities and disruptions inherent to the formation of Western political thought. Her work more broadly focuses on nature as a contested concept, as well as the use of creative methods in social research.

Header Image Credit: Author’s own

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Jaines, Rowan 2022. ‘The Social Life of Agriculture: History Passes into Setting’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (1): 

Editorial: Expertise, ‘Publics’ and the Construction of Government Policy

John Holmwood

This issue of Discover Society is about the role of expertise and professional knowledge in democracy. In the UK, the vexed nature of the issue was, perhaps, best illustrated by (then Justice Secretary) Michael Gove’s comment during the Brexit campaign that he thought, “the people of this country have had enough of experts.” The comment is oft cited, and derided, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, where the public has, or so it is argued, found a new respect for a science that can guide public policy and deliver solutions.

Yet, Michael Gove’s point was more nuanced than is usually credited. It wasn’t scientific advice that he claimed people were fed up with, but “experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” In other words, his complaint was about specific organised advocacy groups and their intervention in public debate and reporting in the media.

… the Government has consistently mobilised the claimed expert opinion of organisations in justification of their policies

Michael Gove’s extended comment was disingenuous. After all, the Brexit campaign, no less than the Remain campaign, drew upon arguments from think tanks and lobby groups. Moreover, since the referendum, the Government has consistently mobilised the claimed expert opinion of organisations in justification of their policies. Indeed, as Layla Aitlhadj and John Holmwood in this special issue argue, they have deliberately ‘managed’ civil society groups and supposedly independent reviews, such as that currently underway into the Prevent counter extremism policy.

In fact, there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between expertise and democracy as Stephen Turner (2003) has observed. The development of liberal democracy involves the rise of professional and expert knowledge which underpins the everyday governance of public institutions. At the same time, wider publics are asked to trust that knowledge even where it impinges directly upon their preferences; they are not in a position to evaluate it, except through the mediation of other experts. Elected politicians and governments, in turn, are dependent on expert knowledge to guide their policy choices, which are duly constrained by what is possible on the basis of technical judgements.

… government consultations are increasingly events where different positions are staged, rather than evidence organised and evaluated

The standard model of liberal democracy presents the role of wider publics as involved intermittently in the determination of policy through electoral choices based upon party manifestos. This introduces a pragmatic constraint upon each potential governing party, that the cycle of electoral politics will also moderate the direction of politics through the replacement of governing parties. Elections may tend to polarise for their duration, but office brings the governing party back closer to the centre ground and a narrowing of the ‘Overton window’ (that frames political possibilities). It is this process that may now have broken down with polarisation increasingly a mode of governing, especially in the context of populist appeals to a claimed majority ‘common-sense’. As Michaela Benson suggests in her piece for this issue, government consultations are increasingly events where different positions are staged, rather than evidence organised and evaluated. But, let us stay with the standard account.

According to it, advocacy groups operate in terms of a general orientation – ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ ‘centre-right’, ‘conservative’ – but tend to focus on a specific range of interests. For example, those interests may be in social care, pensions, health, education, or any other of the public functions of government. Advocacy groups may be organised as think tanks, or directly as civil society organisations, but they tend to be established as charities, defined by their public mission. Together, they contribute to the public debate through research, reports, and campaigns. However, no less than political parties, they are constrained by their need to get their voices heard, which they do by adapting them to the needs of government.

In Turner’s view, the institutional arrangements of democracy tend to favour the incorporation of advocacy into the established political process with, in consequence, an attenuation of the involvement of wider publics. Governments, political parties, listen to lobbyists and justify their policies on the basis of the evidence supplied by their favoured think tanks (who, in turn, are interconnected with other lobbying groups). What is democratic about that? Certainly, it is far from any participatory model of democracy.

In the UK, Brexit was a disruption of this model in that Michael Gove’s complaint about ‘experts’ was a direct appeal to a wider public supposedly alienated from politics as usual (an ‘alienation’ assiduously cultivated in the campaign process). I will return to the implications of populism for liberal democracy and our understanding of democracy.

… the standard mantra of ‘science’ – both natural and social science – is that research is ‘disinterested’

So far, I have suggested that the standard model of liberal democracy implies a particular kind of expertise in which evidence is ‘interest-based’, that is mobilised to support particular policy outcomes. Yet the standard mantra of ‘science’ – both natural and social science – is that research is ‘disinterested’. On this view, it is about providing the sound evidence on which proper policy in the public interest can be based; in other words, the objective is evidence-based policy, not policy-based evidence. This was evident in Richard Portes’s dismissive response to Michael Gove’s comments, for example, where he argued that advocacy groups had a vested interest in undermining experts precisely because they were interested in policy-based evidence and not evidence-based policy.

There is detailed work in the sociology of science that challenges the easy assumption of the neutrality of science, but I want to make a more mundane point here. The public funding of science, especially, in the UK has shaped it in the direction of becoming interest-based. This is the consequence of the so-called ‘impact agenda’, which has required publicly-funded research (until recently in the process of applying for funds, but also in the evaluation of research and its ex post funding through the Research Excellence Framework) to be directly engaged with user beneficiaries. Indeed, in guidance to researchers it is recommended that research should be ‘co-produced’ with users and their interests should be engaged with in the design of the research and not simply in its application after design and execution.

… much policy research … has adapted to government preferences for ‘behavioural’ over ‘structural’ solutions to problems

At best, this involves an instrumentalisation of research, but more profoundly it involves its politicisation. Much science, of course, can be addressed to commercial uses, but most social science is necessarily directed toward the policy realm, where its users are advocacy organisations, or indeed, government itself. The criteria by which research is evaluated in the REF involve a hierarchy of significance where adoption and implementation by national (and international) bodies is superior to influence on local groups or communities. In effect, government is in the position of selecting knowledge/ evidence as fitting with its purposes and, in doing so, confers ‘value’ within academic systems of reputation and revenue. Indeed, as Kat Smith argues in her contribution, much policy research over the last few decades – whether by advocacy groups, or by academics – has adapted to government preferences for ‘behavioural’ over ‘structural’ solutions to problems.  

Let me complicate things with one further step. The language of publics encourages the idea that there is a ‘public interest’ and that it is the task of government to conduct itself with the public interest in mind. This is a convenient fiction among many scientists and is part of the complacent reflection that, in the face of Covid 19, the government has come to recognise the value of science. Yet, as Reiner Grundmann argues in his contribution, it is difficult to separate science from commercial interests and the development of vaccines, however significant for public health, is bound up with the private interests of pharmaceutical companies which create particular path dependencies for future development.

… international fora aggregate national interests and the differential power of existing nation states

These problems are compounded both at ‘global’ and at ‘local’ levels. As the Covid pandemic has illustrated, the developments in the international context of the disease have consequences for national policies and plans. So, too, for the other great challenge facing us, that of climate change. As Mark Harvey argues, international fora aggregate national interests and the differential power of existing nation states. Indeed, the most powerful nations, as well as those most powerful within them, are the most polluting. This is also a problem for the social sciences which are themselves organised nationally and oriented to influence the same powerful actors.

If national policy processes confound international cooperation, the specific nature of some policy regimes also undermines ‘local’ engagement. For example, the neo-liberal approaches to governance favoured by Anglophone political regimes propose that markets embody the public interest, such that policies over the last several decades have involved the transfer of many public services to private providers. Grundmann offers an expansive definition of expertise, to include ‘lay expertise’ and that embodied within ‘communities of practice’. However, for that expertise to be available within the public domain, it needs to be in circulation and privatisation decreases circulation.

Let me provide one example by way of illustration. Schooling in England used to be the responsibility of local educational authorities under elected councils. Local authorities organised educational services and facilitated exchanges across LEAs and with parent associations, trades unions and professional associations, through to the responsible government ministry. Around 75% of secondary schools are now academies and outside the responsibility of local authorities. They are organised within Multi Academy Trusts, which need have no geographical contiguity of its schools. Communities of practice are disrupted and fragmented, and that disruption is the specific aim of government policy.

In effect, while ‘marketisation’ is ostensibly a dispersal of decision-making to individual ‘consumers’,  in the field of public services it involves a centralisation of political power. It is precisely the centralisation of that power that has serious consequences for the standard model of expertise and liberal democracy.

… ‘diversity conservatives’, individuals from black and ethnic minority backgrounds denying structural inequalities

First, it provides government with many more levers for the influence of public debate and provides a strong incentive to use them, since the capacity for civil society to generate counter arguments is diminished. For example, many of the bodies that are assigned an ‘arms-length’ role in the evaluation and regulation of the conduct of government are increasingly filled with appointments of commissioners favourable to the government. This is a process that extends from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, through the National Trust, the Charity Commissioners and Ofcom. This was most clearly illustrated in the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities and its report, which denied institutional racism, notwithstanding the weight of evidence presented to it’ It is also evident in the appointment of William Shawcross as Independent Reviewer of Prevent (see Aitlhadj and Holmwood in this issue). Frequently, as Les Back argues, these commissioners present themselves as ‘diversity conservatives’, individuals from black and ethnic minority backgrounds denying structural inequalities. 

The criticism of the Race and Ethnic Disparities Report by the Runnymede Trust gave rise to a group of conservative MPs requesting that the Charity Commissioners should investigate it for a breach of rules governing its charitable status. This had followed a decade of similar investigations of Muslim charities and civil rights organisations that had criticised the Prevent, as well as lobbying by advocacy groups close to the government to further restrict charities in receipt of public funding from political commentary. Just as the impact agenda shapes publicly-funded research towards government agendas, so a clause in funding bids by charities for public support restricts their critical engagement in the public sphere. The shaping of independent bodies is also extended to proposed new ministerial powers over the Electoral Commission.

In 1967 Howard Becker posed the question to social researchers, ‘whose side are we on?’. His purpose was not to advocate partisanship, but to make the point that research could not avoid being seen as partisan and, therefore, it was important to understand the politics and sociology of expertise. There was, he argued, a hierarchy of credibility where the understandings of elites were normalised and those of the less powerful were marginalised. Social research that aligned itself with the former was also assigned credibility and warranted as ‘objective’. In contrast, social research that sought to address the circumstances of the marginalised was seen as ‘partial’.

… power and privilege always hold their shape and refuse to be impacted upon unless forced to do so

The solution to this latter situation cannot be a retreat to a claim to professional expertise in order to reinforce credibility with gatekeepers, as Ben Baumberg Geiger finds in his interviews with authors of impact case studies for submission to the 2014 REF sociology panel. Back suggests that power and privilege always hold their shape and refuse to be impacted upon unless forced to do so. Academic researchers need to engage more directly and collaboratively with publics and participants, rather than setting their expertise apart from them. Indeed, there are pitfalls in a simple adoption of a ‘social justice’ standpoint. This represents a seemingly different claim to credibility, but without collaboration can involve marginalised communities and activists experiencing the claim to expertise seemingly mobilised on their behalf as oppressive.

If, as Grundmann and Harvey each argues, community groups and the knowledges of protesters are necessary voices, they may also come into conflict with the claims of sociologists and reveal the hidden operation of power. Our final contribution is by three members of the ‘Stansted 15’ who faced imprisonment under counter-terrorism laws for having obstructed a Home Office flight to deport migrants deemed to be ‘illegal’. Mel Evans, Emma Hughes and Ruth Potts write about the experience of being researched and represented in the context both of their risk of imprisonment and the significance of their cause. Their contribution raises serious substantive issues of research practices and knowledge-making, but also ethical issues. The constraints of ‘impact’ impinge whether the researchers regard themselves to be within or outwith hegemonic arrangements.

References:

Becker, Howard (1967) ‘Whose side are we on?’, Social Problems, 14(3): 239-47. DOI:

Turner, Stephen P. (2003) Liberal Democracy, 3.0 Civil Society in an Age of Experts, London: Sage. Geiger, Ben Baumberg (2021) ‘Performing Trustworthiness: the ”credibility work” of prominent sociologists’, Sociology, 55(4): 785-21. DOI:

John Holmwood is emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He is the author (with Therese O’Toole) of Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press 2018) and (with Gurminder K. Bhambra) Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (Polity 2021).

Header image credit: ydant

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Holmwood, John 2021. ‘Editorial: Expertise, ‘Publics’ and the Construction of Government Policy’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (3):

The Making of Critical Knowledge Claims: Research, ‘Allyship’ and Politics of Representation

Mel Evans, Emma Hughes, and Ruth Potts

We write as three individuals who are part of the group that became known as the Stansted 15 (S15), wrongfully prosecuted for stopping an unlawful Home Office deportation charter flight from taking off. We are writing in response to an article by Graeme Hayes, Brian Doherty and Steven Cammiss, ‘Disciplinary Power and Impression Management in the Trials of the Stansted 15’, published open access on 11 November 2020 in Sociology, a week before the appeal of our conviction under terror-related legislation was heard at the Court of Appeal.

… the authors have not only misunderstood our activism, but have contributed to reinforcing the very structures of power we were working to undermine

We disagree fundamentally with the authors’ central findings, and consider that they failed to meet appropriate ethical standards in conducting their research in relation to the subjects of their study: a group of people facing serious, potentially life-altering charges in an unprecedented criminal trial. The authors’ description of their methodology as ‘ethnographic’ creates the impression that their research yields insights into S15 strategy, behaviour and subjectivity which are not otherwise available in the public domain. However, the authors have not only misunderstood our activism, but have contributed to reinforcing the very structures of power we were working to undermine.

Our actions at trial, viewed as an extension of our activism in solidarity with a group of asylum seekers facing deportation, sought to maintain the focus on the UK government’s actions and its impacts on non-citizens as a way of problematising the notion of citizenship, to whom it is granted and by whom. The authors, in contrast, construct our trial as being about ‘us’ as citizens subject to the processes of the state, an event separable from the action we were being tried for, which was about ‘them’, non-citizens at risk of deportation.

Indeed, the motivation for our action – namely that of protesting the hostile environment, stopping deportations and preventing the removal of individuals due to be on the flight we stopped – is barely mentioned in the article, which fails to make any connections between our actions on the tarmac and our actions in the courtroom. Had the authors undertaken a sustained and thorough ethnography, it would have been difficult for them to come to conclusions which so fundamentally misconstrue our motivations.

Further, we argue that the authors’ conclusions are potentially dangerous for activists who might find themselves in a similar situation, facing serious criminal charges for protesting, especially in the context of new government legislation in its Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill designed to further criminalise protest. As researchers ourselves, we offer this critique of their methods and conclusions in the hope that it will inform the authors’ future research and to encourage broader critical reflection among academic and activist communities.

Compliance and Resistance in the Courtroom

The authors contend that courts are viewed by activists as a place where they can ‘speak truth to power’, but we never viewed it as that. For us, the courtroom was a place where we were, at times, able to centre the brutality of the UK’s deportation and detention regime, but it was not the most significant place where we did that. Far more meaningful for us were events like the demonstration outside the Home Office the day after the verdict, where thousands of people protested against the government’s brutal hostile environment, and defendants spoke – in terms of their choosing – about the action and the issue. Our trial provided a rationale for commentators and academics, including Hayes et al., to explore the issues of border brutality and charter flight deportation in print, blogs and broadcast media. By failing to acknowledge the wider political context and the public arena in which the trial played out, the authors construct the trial as not ‘about’ these issues.

They interpret the fact that people weren’t imprisoned as being reflective of the intention of the state, rather than a position that the state was forced into

Hayes et al. refer to their previous analysis of the Heathrow 13, who were told to expect a three-month jail sentence for aggravated trespass by a judge who later handed down community orders. They fail to recognise that rather than “disarming radical critique so that leniency can be applied”, it was the work of the social movement around those defendants that generated so much media attention on their prospective imprisonment that the judge felt unable to hand down the harsher sentence she had previously committed to deliver. They interpret the fact that people weren’t imprisoned as being reflective of the intention of the state, rather than a position that the state was forced into. We argue the opposite: that the tactics of activists during our trial both inside and outside the courtroom, are precisely what ensured we avoided jail time, just as in the case of the Heathrow 13.

The authors fail to understand the shifting circumstances in which activists operate and deny the possibility that social movements are able to influence what happens. In a later piece, they assert that our victory at appeal was limited because AMSA (the Airport and Maritime Security Act 1990, a ‘Convention offence’ for the purposes of the Terrorism Act 2006) had never been used against activists before. The victory was important precisely because it meant that AMSA couldn’t be used again (several people had already been charged under AMSA after our conviction), and because of the light it shone on the criminalisation of protest, particularly migrant solidarity. The outcome was important, but so was the process. Hayes et al. dismiss both.

They fail to examine the offence we were charged with in any detail. They consider this a ‘standard’ protest case, exploring only the necessity defence which is frequently used in protest cases. But for the Stansted 15 it was not our central defence (and indeed not the ground that we successfully argued on appeal). The necessity defence enabled us to explain in court why we did what we did. The other central pillar of our defence was that AMSA should never have been used in what was clearly a protest case, and was an attempt to escalate the criminalisation of migrant solidarity. As the Lord Chief Justice wrote “the appellants should never have been prosecuted under this extremely serious offence….There was in truth no case to answer”.

Put simply, our case was markedly different from most protest cases, the penalties we faced were markedly different, and the legal strategies we pursued had to be markedly different.

Instead of acknowledging this context, Hayes et al. describe our actions through the lens of ‘script compliance’. This is Zoettl’s (2016) notion that “the defendant’s body plays an important part in the validation of criminal procedure through disciplinary ‘script compliance’: the unspoken rules that regulate bodily posture and movement serve to ‘visually acknowledge the court’s authority to deliver a sentence over the person accused and thus the validity of the sentence itself’”. Hayes et al. argue that the defendants’ dress, body language, and behaviour were examples of this alleged disavowal of our own agency and political identity, and consequent acceptance of the court’s rulings and sentencing.

The authors fail to differentiate between what was said in the courtroom, and how it was said. The politics of our action were displayed in the courtroom. Multiple images of the defendants wearing sweatshirts bearing the words “no-one is illegal” and “mass deportations kill” were on display, while video footage replayed the chants “no borders, no nations, stop deportations”. Looking back from the witness stand at our co-defendants, we often saw half-hearted attempts at public presentation with slouching or belligerent body language towards the court, coats slung across chairs and the witness box in disarray.

Defendants who took the witness stand were admonished by the judge for being ‘political’ as they sought to explain the cruelty of the deportation and detention regime to the jury. They may not have used the words “abolition” or “dismantling the border regime” but their testimony was entirely congruent with those positions. The accounts were simply rendered intelligible to those outside elite groups of activists through their choice of language.

The authors single out the behaviour and language of Mel Evans, an author of this response who self-represented in court, as emblematic of ‘script compliance’. Yet Evans’ ‘behaviour’ in court produced a range of immediate outcomes which could as easily be argued to be effective resistance to the court and government. As a self-representing defendant, Evans was the only member of the legal defence team able to elicit admission from a police officer that officers had instantly recognised the Stansted 15 to be protesters rather than people intent on violence. Evans also succeeded in confirming that our concerns regarding the Home Office’s unlawful deportation was something we had discussed with officers. These are defence claims which otherwise would have remained unconfirmed by any prosecution witness.

Rather than engaging with these points, the researchers support their construction of ‘script compliance’ with quotes from interviewees, including “I really regret that…So everyone was disciplined and to not, like, have a reaction when the verdict happens.” This quote reveals suggestive questioning on the part of the researcher. ‘That’ presumably refers to the proposition put to the interviewee, which Hayes et al. do not quote or contextualise in their piece. We think it unlikely that interviewees would have spontaneously used the word ‘disciplined’ without it being put to them by Hayes et al.. Furthermore, the depiction is inaccurate: there were loud and expressive responses to the verdict from the dock, recorded in several media articles penned by defendants which the authors appear to have failed to cross reference with the quote they employ for the purposes of their article.

Matsuda’s point is precisely that activists who call for the dismantling of laws nonetheless need to strategically engage with law on its terms in order to survive when its violence is being directed against them

Further, Hayes et al. misinterpret academic commentators de Noronha and Chowdhury, implying their analysis is that “defendants have (at least potentially) considerable agency to engage the court ‘as a space in which to air a radical critique’.” In fact de Noronha and Chowdhury are citing Mari Matsuda (1988: 8) here, whose point is more complex: “There are times to stand outside the courtroom door and say ‘this procedure is a farce, the legal system is corrupt, justice will never prevail in this land as long as privilege rules in the courtroom.’ There are [also] times to stand in the courtroom and say, ‘this is a nation of laws, laws recognizing fundamental values of rights, equality and personhood.’” Matsuda’s point is precisely that activists who call for the dismantling of laws nonetheless need to strategically engage with law on its terms in order to survive when its violence is being directed against them. In reference to our case, de Noronha and Chowdhury were recognising the need to defend the human rights of others in a criminal court, rather than bluntly dismissing the court process itself as a political farce, as Hayes et al. invite their readers to do.

The authors conclude, “We see these trials therefore as a normalising procedure whose goal is not the repressive application of custodial sentences, but rather a disciplinary disarming of radical critique so that leniency can be applied.” This is a dangerous lesson to be drawn from our trial. There are many reasons why we didn’t receive a jail sentence: the brilliant work of our lawyers, our own actions and tactics in court, the huge public scrutiny the trial received, and the broad public support from establishment figures to ‘ordinary’ members of the public. The Frack Free Three – jailed for Obstruction of the Highway, a lesser charge, in the opening days of our trial (a sentence later reduced as excessive following a political campaign and highly resourced legal appeal) – showed that without media attention many judges are only too willing to hand out prison sentences.

Centring Whiteness and Activism

The analysis described above ignores the particular concern of the Stansted 15 to focus the story of our trial in the public arena on people bearing the brunt of the Home Office’s racist and frequently unlawful immigration system, rather than on ourselves. The attention the authors paid to our dress and courtroom behaviour misinterpreted our agreed intention to avoid drawing negative public attention onto us as ‘deviants’ which could be reflected back on migrants whose precarity makes them much more vulnerable to the state. Any dramatic resistance to court procedures would have drawn attention to us, rather than the people whose lives were on the line through brutal treatment at the hands of the government. The authors’ analysis fails to grasp this crucial aspect of our strategy, and instead serves to subvert this strategy and draw attention to us rather than those with whom we acted in solidarity.

Hayes et al. therefore do not recognise that the decentring of whiteness was fundamental not only to the actions for which we were charged, but also to the approach we took in courtroom testimonies, the media and at public rallies. For Hayes et al., as for the UK Home Office, the deportees are not subjects, and what this trial is about is a domestic drama of protest regulation played out by liberal subjects, defined implicitly as white citizens.

Rather than substantiating their claim that the Stansted 15 became the ‘ideal disciplined liberal subject’, their analysis relies on a white, macho projected ideal of their perfect political activist. They establish a critical frame of our supposed presentation as ‘caring activists’. This in itself is a misogynist critical frame which, in failing to see or understand the political power of ‘care’, itself reinforces the dominant neoliberal frame in which it is considered irrational, or not even possible, to care for those outside immediate kinship groups.

… the people due to be forced onto the plane do not appear as characters at all

Their ideal, implicitly white, citizen, macho-heroic political activist seemingly cares only about the performative politics of self-expression, and not the impacts of such on others. This mythologised figure is part of the metropolitan liberal elite, and his performativity and blindness to the impacts of his actions is deeply neoliberal and conservative in nature. For Hayes et al. this character of the activist is central – the people due to be forced onto the plane do not appear as characters at all.

The authors misread our actions as much as they misread us. The heroes of the authors’ imaginations are also, implicitly, part of an urban liberal elite. They wrote that Chelmsford seemed alien to us. The reality is we walked the streets commenting on how much it was like the towns we grew up in – Epsom, Croydon and Stockport. They claimed not to want to explore intersectionality ‘because that would be a much bigger job’, but made assumptions about our race and class that didn’t bear any relation to reality, lumping us all in a blanket ‘from London’, ‘estranged by working class people’ when that would be an analysis only applicable to, at most, one or two defendants.

They made a very obvious error stating ‘only two of the defendants were non-white’, strange given their declared constant presence in the courtroom for them to fail to see colour in the defendants’ box. There were three people of colour in the group, as well as a number of identities differing to ‘white English’ including Romany, Spanish, Irish and Jewish, with obvious connections to issues of migration and asylum. Multiple defendants testified to being the first person in their family to go to university, and the actual class backgrounds of the group stretch widely across society’s demographics.

The authors state that they ‘have not fore-grounded questions of intersectionality in our analysis, not because we think they are unimportant (indeed, they are likely to be central to further work on protest trials), but because our primary focus here is on the situational relationship between defendants, individually and as a collective, and other actors in the court’. It is deeply questionable to what extent the authors can meaningfully engage in questions of power, subjectivity and situational relationship while failing to contend with intersectional dimensions of gender, race, and class.

Instead, they note that some of us wore remembrance poppies in court, or made reference to holidays, and describe these as attempts to normalise ourselves in the eyes of the jury, as part of their so-called script compliance. They fail to countenance that a) many of us might actually be ‘normal’ as such (see ‘Give Up Activism’, Andrew X, 1999)  and that b) it is a valid political strategy in any trial, activist or otherwise, for a defendant to build on possible points of commonality with a jury rather than merely railing at or against them.

… all effective activism relies on its ability to build commonality with others

It is arguable that all effective activism relies on its ability to build commonality with others. This is not hollow performative allyship, but a recognition that change requires the development of coalitions of shared interests. In attempting to connect with the people due to be on the plane, with the jury and with a broader public through media coverage of the trial, it was such a commonality of interests that the defendants were attempting to create. The researchers use these examples to fortify their depiction of our script compliance, and in so doing they fail to see the potential resistance of these acts: the invitation to care about other ordinary people like ourselves – in all of their complexity – such as those due to be forced onto the plane we lay underneath.

Conclusion

The core issue, we contend, is not as the authors conclude, ‘the transformation of the transgressive activist into the ideal disciplined liberal subject’. Far from it. We identify multiple and creative assertions of agency within the confines of the court process, constantly shifting balances of power in the courtroom in spite of what was at stake. These include the dynamic interplay of coercion and resistance, the multiple identities inhabited by defendants, legal team, jurors and judge and the politics of the “caring activist”. Given these strategies ultimately resulted in our success at appeal, as well as significant public discussion of the issues we sought to draw attention to on multiple occasions it may now be clearly evident that there were a great number of strengths in this approach.    

We close by drawing on feminist legal critique and its fundamental lesson: Don’t victimise the victim. It does not assist those who have been subject to a greater power, state or otherwise, to merely emphasise their victimhood without any scope for empowerment and resistance. In this case, the very moments the authors define as our subjugation also contained our greatest resistances. It is much more accurate and interesting, we contend, to consider how coercion and resistance operated within the same moments. Moreover, the authors assume that we accepted the court’s authority to pass judgement on us, an authority we challenged every step of the way and more fundamentally never accepted.

The flawed methods of Hayes et al. meant that they couldn’t see, let alone understand what was happening inside the courtroom and its impacts and ramifications in the wider political arena. We have raised significant questions regarding their outdated and limited ethnographic methodologies that treat participants as the ‘objects’ of research, rather than participants in the research process. The intention of the researchers showed scope for a nuanced account of a protest trial from which valuable conclusions could have been drawn, contributing to academic understanding of agency and of value for the wider movement. Theirs however simply wasn’t it.

References:

Hayes Graeme, Cammiss Steven, Doherty Brian (2021) ‘Disciplinary Power and Impression Management in the Trials of the Stansted 15’, Sociology, 55(3):561-581. doi:10.1177/0038038520954318. Published online first, November 11, 2020

Matsuda, Mari J. (1989) ‘When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method. A Talk Presented at the Yale Law School Conference on Women of Color and the Law, April 16, 1988’, Women’s Rights Law Reporter, ll (1): 7-10.

Mel Evans has a BA in Sociology and Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow, is author of Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (Pluto: 2015), has chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics (Routledge: 2019) and ArtWork: Art, Activism and Labour (Rowman and Littlefield: 2018), and multiple articles published in peer reviewed journals including Performance Research and the Scottish Journal of Performance as part of art-activist collective Liberate Tate.

Emma Hughes has a PhD in Media and Communications from the University of Cardiff and worked for four years as a Research Associate at Cardiff University. She has multiple articles published in peer reviewed journals (e.g Environmental Politics, Journal of Public Affairs), including on the representation of protest. 

Ruth Potts has a BA in Modern European History from Warwick University, an MSc in Latin American Politics from the University of London, previously a senior lecturer in Ecological Design Thinking, Schumacher College and is a co-author (with Dr Jyotsna Ram) of an essay in Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry (PM Press: 2020). 

All images, credit: Kristian Buus

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Evans, Mel, Emma Hughes and Ruth Potts 2021. ‘The Making of Critical Knowledge Claims: Research, ‘Allyship’ and Politics of Representation’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (3):

Appendix: Methodological concerns, ethics and potential harm of research

The research methods Hayes et al employed raise important questions about ethnography. In the fields of sociology and anthropology, ethnography is a rightly contested practice in which practitioners debate the ethics of both methodology and the positionality of researchers in drawing conclusions about their subjects. The authors assert theirs is “the first ethnographic account of a protest trial.” However, we argue that this claim is wholly unearned. The authors infer they had special access to the inner workings of the S15 trial strategy, presumably by building relationships of trust with us, their informants and subjects. In fact, their methods consisted mainly of court observations supplemented by short interviews with only half of the defendants, under conditions which were arguably constrained and unethical. Their flawed methods meant they were not able to understand the reality of what took place in the courtroom, let alone draw out wider implications of our trial and defence strategy.

The authors claim to have produced an account of the “internal dynamics” of a “protest trial” yet they were privy to none of the “internal dynamics” of our trial. They did not attend a single group meeting, any of the multiple daily meetings with our legal team, the media team meetings, the support group meetings. Nor did they engage with us beyond pleasantries or casual conversation in the court’s public waiting room. This is why the article relies so heavily on the testimony we delivered in the open courtroom.

Although they approached some – but crucially, not all – individual defendants in an ad-hoc way requesting ‘a chat sometime’, at no point did they seek a meeting with the whole group, or distribute copies of their information sheet and consent form to all defendants, which would have been easy to do at any point during the eleven-week period they were present at Chelmsford Crown Court. The authors sent two emails about their research to individual defendants and a defendant group email address; we deem this as a totally inadequate explanation, failure of a duty of care and, at best, a half-hearted attempt to seek full group consent, as they should have. Both emails were missed by most defendants in the deluge of emails regarding our case, and received no reply from the entire group.

As the three of the defendants whose actions the authors cite the most, it is notable that during the eleven weeks of our trial/s, the authors did not once engage any of us in a single conversation.  Although they asked Ruth and Mel for interviews (at a time when we were just about to enter the courtroom), Emma was never asked for an interview or spoken to directly by the authors. The authors’ research was never introduced or explained to Emma during the eleven week duration of both trials. Some of the eight out of 15 defendants who did provide an email address to be contacted about the research were emailed an information sheet, but without direct reference to the need to sign a consent form. Three of the eight interviews seem to have consisted of single 45-minute meetings, with only one person being interviewed twice; two of what are presented as interviews were taken from a public presentation made by two defendants.

There is confusion for several defendants who spoke to the authors: one appears to have been considered an interview for the purposes of the article but the defendant interviewed thought it was about something else, and two wonder if court waiting room conversations were considered interviews. The three formal interviews were arranged in cafes during or immediately after the trial. Seven out of eight of the defendants considered to be participants have no recollection of signing a consent form, and the single defendant who did sign a form did so in July 2017, for an earlier, different, piece of research, separate from their second interview following trial which presumably provided the bulk of material for the article. Following a Freedom of Information request, the School of Languages and Social Science Research Ethics Committee at Aston University, which approved the research, refused to, or could not, provide documentation to show how many participants had given informed consent for this research.

The informed consent of the entire group was never sought. In their research outline sent to those who gave interviews, the authors state “It is up to you whether you decide to participate or not”, but also that “informed consent will not be sought where action is undertaken, or opinion expressed, in non-confidential public actions.” However, their research is dependent on observations, described as ethnographic, of all S15 members and while interviewees are granted anonymity in the published article, defendants who gave evidence are not. The failure to seek the participation of the whole group meant that the possibility of deeper engagement and a process of reviewing the findings ‘with’ the participants was precluded.

We were 15 people with different perspectives, backgrounds and present situations which meant we inevitably had contrasting perspectives on the legal strategies being pursued. These differences were discussed at length by the group and understood by all of us, including the fundamental difference between those who gave evidence and those who did not. The authors’ failure to understand us as both individuals and a group is demonstrated most clearly in their inaccurate depiction of who testified during the trial. Of the seven defendants who testified, not one of them was interviewed by the researchers. Hayes et al. assert that “The eight with prior convictions did not give evidence, dispossessing them of their expressive autonomy, and denying them an opportunity to resist the framing of the trial narrative, for the entirety of proceedings. This also had a broader political effect, hiding the wider political connections and histories of more than half the defendants.” 

This statement is not correct. The three authors of this response have multiple previous trials or convictions related to acts of protest, and all of us testified. Several of the defendants who testified referred specifically to their previous convictions on the witness stand. One of the three of us has such a long list of misdemeanours that the prosecution spent a full hour outlining them at sentencing. This example demonstrates how Hayes et al feel confident to draw sweeping conclusions about us, our trial and the broader political impacts of it based on insubstantial evidence and basic errors.

These conclusions include that “the defendants’ self regulating calibration to the disciplinary regime of the courtroom served to limit their subjectivity and obscure their political motivations” and “the defendants performed their participation in court in highly legalistic, non-transgressive, ways”. Further, they write that “combining macro and micro approaches”  reveals “the interplay of agency and structure in situ”, “providing important insights into how actors make sense of their social world, and how agency is constrained by structure.” Not only did they fail to understand our sense making, but this failure produced partial and flawed analysis that failed to adequately position the ‘micro’ context of the ‘disciplinary regime of the courtroom’ with ‘macro’ considerations of racialised power that structured our participation in the courtroom as part of our wider political goals.

The research received ethical approval from the School of Languages and Social Science Research Ethics Committee at Aston University, and the authors claimed “The study is designed to adhere to the guidelines set out in the British Sociological Association’s Statement of Ethical Practice”. A Freedom of Information request revealed that the Committee paid scant attention to the ethical approval process. There was no formal confirmation letter of ethical approval nor was there a meeting of the Ethics Committee. In fact, ethical approval was granted in a rush over a weekend in correspondence with one colleague, evidently a familiar relationship, in a chain of emails titled “Ethics emergency!”

In this email chain there is no discussion of the serious criminal proceedings we faced, nor any regard given to the potential impact of the research on participants. The ethical approval appears to have been dismissed as paperwork, with one correspondent protesting “it seems…rather bureaucratic and unnecessary…and inappropriate for our discipline.” They agree a “soft version” is sufficient. The overwhelming concern seems to have been with the researcher’s career rather than the participants’ safety, epitomised by the prioritisation of research outputs: “If they could withdraw at a very late stage, it could fuck up any publication.” The authors did not offer to share their prospective publication with us for comment and, in fact, they published it online with no prior warning a week before our appeal was heard at the Court of Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice

We question whether full consideration was given to the vulnerability of the participants in view of the serious criminal charges they faced, and the implications of conducting (and publishing) the research while the criminal proceedings were ongoing. Defendants were experiencing extreme anxiety and distress. Our physical and mental health, relationships and jobs were all put under incredible strain by the trial process and potential custodial sentence. Rather than have this position of vulnerability recognised and treated with appropriate levels of care, we were turned into two-dimensional research objects in the authors’ empirical engagement with us and in their published article.

The authors do not consider the personal impacts of the trial and threat of serious punishment, be that fear and anxiety or the loss of employment, homes and relationships experienced by some of the defendants over the course of the trial, despite these being the three pillars of many people’s lives, which prison is designed to deny and disrupt. Our lawyers had told us to prepare for a significant custodial sentence following the imprisonment of the Frack Free Three on lesser charges immediately before the start of our second trial. No consideration is given to whether and how the researchers’ presence and research activity, including note-taking and interviews, might have influenced the defendants’ experience of the trial and perspective on the defence strategy, or how their lines of questioning, and selection – intentional or otherwise – of only those defendants who didn’t give evidence – might have contributed to discord within the group.

Research often fails to do what it sets out to achieve and researchers who have set out complex methodologies in theory scale back their methods in practice. This is acceptable so long as the methods deployed are not disingenuous or harmful, and the research aims and conclusions are set out clearly and correspond to one another. The participant information sheet stated “We will ensure that the study is conducted according to ethical principles structured around our duty of care to participants, and that no harm will come to any participant as a result of their participation in the research.”

In our view, harm has been done through this research on a number of levels. Firstly, the defendants who participated in the research were treated as the ‘perfect neoliberal research subjects’ – sources of data and not people. They were given consent forms and information sheets for what appears to be a previous research project and rather than being taken seriously, participants right to withdraw from the research was to viewd by the researches as a threat which could “fuck up publication’. Harm was inevitably done to the internal process of the group of defendants as the researchers separated defendants from the group as subjects to be interrogated and drawn by lines of questioning, potentially disrupting carefully navigated strategies. Harm was done to the wider community of activists facing protest trials and their collective understanding of the very real risks posed to their liberty. Finally, harm was done to the academic and wider political and intellectual community’s understanding of the political strategy of the Stansted 15 defence in relation to the protection of the human rights of non-citizens.

The decision to fully attribute statements made in court is also ethically questionable. While technically the court transcripts can be publicly accessed, the authors have significantly amplified the visibility of the defendants’ names and statements without the prior consent of those defendants. While this is technically permissible, it suggests a lack of compassion and regard for the defendants, particularly as minimal attempt was made to interview the named defendants, or to explain the context in which their words and actions were to be analysed, for instance by way of an Information Sheet distributed among all members of the Stansted 15.

A more ethical, and also, we suggest, productive approach would have been to fully engage all participants, and to discuss their analysis with us. Such an approach is not uncommon in ethnographic research, particularly where the researcher has a relationship with participants. While the authors may claim this would have harmed their independent analysis, it would in fact have enabled them more effectively to consider our actions at trial through a better understanding of our strategies and motivations.

Covid, Expertise, and Society: Stepping out of the Shadow of Epidemiology?

Reiner Grundmann

There are still many unknowns about the virus and its diffusion. No matter how developed the scientific knowledge base is, there is a political imperative to take decisions. While science provides knowledge about facts, experts make judgements about what to do. They do this in the face of scientific uncertainty. Unlike scientists who strive to reduce uncertainty, experts try to answer the question of what we should do, given the knowns and unknowns.

In the UK, and many other countries, governments have set up advisory bodies to address the pandemic. Their advice was sought as the virus was new and little was known. The advice has been used to justify policy interventions designed to steer the country out of the crisis. These bodies are usually composed of scientists from a relatively narrow disciplinary range. Epidemiology is the leading discipline. It provides the epistemic core, the logic and rationale for decision-making. This choice is seen as proper and adequate by most commentators, given the nature of the problem.

Because the problem has already been framed in epidemiological terms, we do not question the central role of epidemiology itself

But the choice has deep consequences in terms of framing the problem. Framing is here understood to comprise defining a problem, attributing causality and blame, and identifying remedial action (Entman 1993). Because the problem has already been framed in epidemiological terms, we do not question the central role of epidemiology itself. Even the appointment of experts for advisory bodies is not seen as a choice, where another choice could have led to other courses of action. It is seen as a ‘natural’ reflection of the problem.

This is not to say that epidemiology is not important. Of course it is, and it was most instrumental to alert politicians to the exponential nature of the pandemic in early 2020. However, it is time to recognize the consequences that arise from its privileged position in the process of producing and delivering expertise for what is necessarily political decision-making, and what other perspectives could be useful that have been pushed into the background.

Not only has a particular academic discipline been privileged, but academic research as such. But expertise is far broader than science based. As I will argue below, there are important sources of expertise in civil society, and in the professions. These sources need to contribute more vigorously to a debate about how we should deal with the pandemic, what principles should guide us, and what society we want to build.

Hulme et al. (2020) cogently argue that “because decisions with far-reaching consequences are being made now, it is precisely the right time to call for a greater plurality of knowledge. This entails bringing in broader sources of knowledge to the decision-making process, promoting more transparent decision-making processes and dismantling unhelpful ‘hierarchies of knowledge’. In these ‘hierarchies’, certain forms of knowledge (e.g., certain disciplines within natural sciences) are seen as inherently superior, rather than as complementary. Such a diversification of knowledge would benefit both the effectiveness of decisions made, as well as the legitimacy of those decisions among publics.” (Hulme et al. 2020).

The necessary but insufficient role of epidemiology

My argument is that Covid-19 has been framed as a problem by, and for epidemiology. Several countries have seen epidemiological knowledge as the only legitimate and relevant knowledge when it comes to making decisions. Other forms of scientific knowledge, and other forms of expertise, have been marginalised.

The dominant, epidemiology-based approach has three salient elements (which were developing over time, with overlaps). First, it emphasized the crucial role of diffusion of infections, measured by the reproduction rate R, and the need to reduce this via non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Social distancing, hand hygiene, mask wearing, and isolation were the tools for the job. Then pharmaceutical treatment options were discussed, and recommendations about effective medicines were made. However, the main method to eradicate the disease was the development of an effective vaccine. This would be the game changer in the pandemic, allowing us all to return to social life as we knew it. Research and investment in effective treatment has paled in comparison.

Waves of new infections are recurring, even in countries with high rates of vaccination

Surprisingly, vaccines became quickly available, if extremely uneven across the globe. But they did not prove the game changer they were expected to be, and it is an open question if they ever can be. To avoid misunderstanding, all of the above measures have contributed to a significant amelioration, but the trend of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths has not been uniformly downward. Waves of new infections are recurring, even in countries with high rates of vaccination. This indicates that we need to talk about the limits of the epistemic model which provides the foundation for these strategies and hopes.

It is no surprise that the epidemiological model has come under pressure from its nemesis, vaccine critical voices. They represent different social groups, and it is tempting but futile to dismiss them as irrational and irresponsible. To be sure, higher vaccination rates lead to fewer infections, severe cases, and deaths. But based on current evidence, the vaccines will not lead to an eradication of Covid-19. There are several reasons for this. The virus has become endemic, and it is present in several animal species. There are new variants against which existing vaccines may be much less effective.

The virus, and its ever-evolving mutations, is present in all countries and can move from a high incidence country to a low incidence country. Medical researchers from the USA put it this way: “Rather than die out, the virus will likely ping-pong back and forth across the globe for years to come. Some of yesterday’s success stories are now vulnerable to serious outbreaks. Many of these are places that kept the pandemic at bay through tight border controls and excellent testing, tracing, and isolation but have been unable to acquire good vaccines. … But even countries that have vaccinated large proportions of their populations will be vulnerable to outbreaks caused by certain variants. That is what appears to have happened in several hot spots in Chile, Mongolia, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom.” (Brilliant et al. 2021).

The authors make the perhaps provocative statement: “The virus is here to stay. The question is, What do we need to do to ensure that we are, too?”

… what makes Covid-19 so difficult to combat is that it is an airborne illness with so much asymptomatic transmission

Their answer is informed by the epidemiological model, too. The main recommendation is to vaccinate in, and around hotspots of infections, something practiced in the 1970s smallpox outbreak in African countries and India. Such ‘ring vaccinations’ would solve the problem of shortages of vaccine supply. The authors acknowledge the challenge to their approach but remain optimistic: “Of course, it was a different disease, a different vaccine, and a different time. Part of what makes Covid-19 so difficult to combat is that it is an airborne illness with so much asymptomatic transmission. Today, however, epidemiologists have the added benefit of powerful new tools for detecting outbreaks and developing vaccines. They can use these innovations to build a twenty-first century version of surveillance and containment for the battle against this pandemic.”

Asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 is what makes the virus so persistent. While this was known early on, the fact that it was also airborne came as a later insight. Both elements combine to make existing models of prevention so fragile. This would also be the case with ring-vaccinations. Even vaccinated people can become infected and transmit the virus without showing symptoms. As we have also learned, electronic surveillance systems have not delivered what they were hoped to do.

While the above-mentioned approach recognizes the challenge, and is cognizant of many social variables that are important to consider (including the need to build effective international institutions to deal with this, and other pandemics), it still is heavily influenced by the epidemiological paradigm.

The role of science, expertise and decision-making

Above I have pointed out that science scientific advisors in the pandemic tend to be epidemiologists. Other forms of expertise need to be identified. I specifically draw attention to commentators, professional specialists, and lay experts (Grundmann 2017, 2018, 2022). They all bridge the gap between knowledge and decision-making, but do this in different ways. While policy advisors are usually working behind the scenes, in close proximity to government, other scientists are speaking up as commentators in public debate, communicating their views of the problem, sometimes suggesting solutions. Professionals have specialist knowledge of relevant technical aspects or social practices, and the scope for intervention. Lay experts offer views from civil society based on experience, and reflecting social concerns. It should be noted that the WHO advocates the inclusion of communities; they should have a voice, be informed and engaged, and participate (Habersaat et al. 2020; Marston, Renedo, and Miles 2020; WHO 2020).

Governments have pursued different policies in the their fight against Covid-19 (Stevens 2020). Where we see relative success, this does not seem to be due to better scientific understanding, but due to preparedness in public health administrations, especially via functioning test and trace and systems, vaccination programmes, adherence to distancing rules, and hospital treatment. It is still unclear how close the link is between government regulations and success in fighting the disease.

A commentator in the Financial Times wrote, “a few countries, it is true, have almost unambiguously good stories to tell. But it is some feat to spot the values and institutions that link Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Mongolia. As if to tease us, when a theme does emerge — the heedless ‘neoliberalism’ of Anglo-America — it wilts on further evidence. That is, we have learnt less and less over time. The past 18 months are so haunting in part because they lack all pattern and meaning.” Even this assessment looks doubtful one month after publication (I am writing this on 31 August).

The dominance of epidemiology has led to a focus on eradication of the Covid-19 virus

The dominance of epidemiology has led to a focus on eradication of the Covid-19 virus. This seemed plausible with the unexpectedly fast development of vaccines. A technical solution seemed in sight which would allow societies to return to normality in the course of months.

However, the vaccines have their own problems, they are not 100% safe, nor effective. As with all vaccines they come with side-effects. They also lose effectiveness after months, and are perhaps not effective against mutations of the virus. Pharmaceutical companies are going to benefit from booster vaccinations, maybe for years to come. At the same time they reject all liability for side-effects, pushing it onto the purchasing countries, as leaked documents show. Their rent-seeking strategy has been rewarded with vast sums of government money, which overall reduces the appetite to spend on other forms of treatment.

Such news gives further support to vaccine critical groups which, in turn, poses a serious problem to the epidemiological paradigm, as a certain percentage of immunity needs to be achieved in order for the epidemic to recede. Statisticians Spiegelhalter and Masters reckon this to be around 86% of the population.

Some authors argue that the problem is lack of information, and the pernicious effect of disinformation campaigns. For example,  Baldwin & Lenton (2020) emphasize the eminent role of scientific consensus v disinformation. As several studies have shown, vaccine hesitancy is a more complex phenomenon (Hobson-West 2003; Reicher and Stott 2020). Issues of trust vis-à-vis the government and its public health institutions are crucial in this respect. Information campaigns will change very little, especially if they are ‘talking down’ to those who are not convinced.

National responses

The spread of the virus is uneven across the world. No matter how much progress one country makes with vaccination programmes, new variants can appear in other countries and spread across the globe. The is no global governance institution to co-ordinate the response measures. The powers of the World Health Organization (WHO) are limited and its advice to governments has been disregarded in the past. Attempts at international co-ordination and co-operation are minimal (Brown and Susskind 2020; Buck et al. 2020; Grundmann 2021), although some collaboration has been underway in the search for a vaccine (Kupferschmidt 2020).

… rich countries have secured the lion share of vaccines, leaving large parts of the rest of the world without

National responses have been the standard mode of operating, and this will continue to be the case. Vaccine nationalism has been evident in the procurement and distribution of vaccines, and in the politics of recognizing vaccination certificates across borders. Most importantly, rich countries have secured the lion share of vaccines, leaving large parts of the rest of the world without. Ethical debates have emerged about the prospect of having booster jabs or vaccinations for children in rich countries while the poor go without.

All this points to the question of how we, as a society, and as an international community, could deal with the challenge. What is our aim? What is the strategy? As soon as we pose these simple questions, we realize that the answers are far from clear.

Sometimes some governments have stated the eradication of the virus as their goal (‘zero-Covid’). More modest goals are: contain the spread of the disease, reduce hospitalizations and severe cases, or keep the health system going. Others argue that ‘living with Covid’ is the only realistic option as the problem will not go away any time soon (Brilliant et al. 2021). This requires several measures, like continuing with social distancing, mask wearing, and providing effective treatment in severe cases. For some, disrupting social life is not legitimate, especially when the number of severe cases and deaths reaches low levels comparable to other diseases.

Wicked problems

‘Wicked problems’ only can be managed better or worse, not be solved once and for all (Grundmann 2016; Rayner 2006; Rittel and Webber 1973). The verdict is still out if Covid-19 falls into this category of social problem. The quick development of vaccines has given hope that successful vaccines will solve the problem. Initial enthusiasm has given way to a more sober assessment as the virus has shown several mutations which may hinder the vaccine effectiveness (Vogel and Kupferschmidt 2021).

Nevertheless, the availability of vaccines could be seen as a ‘technological core’ which can be refined over time (Sarewitz and Nelson 2008) so that herd immunity can be achieved. Cheap vaccines that can be easily stored and administered would help. However, as the above has shown there is not enough supply of vaccines across the world, new variants are likely to emerge, and vaccine hesitancy may be a force that could limit such efforts. Wicked problems have no stopping rules; if zero Covid is not a realistic prospect we will see different definitions of success come and go.

Given these parameters I am convinced that the involvement of all forms of expertise will be required so we can discover ways that work to keep the problem at bay. A broad range of expertise is required, from advisors, professionals, commentators, and civil society. This will help to develop and support social practices that are embedded in our daily lives. We already have become frustrated by the on-off logic of large lockdowns that are based on territories and industries. Engineers may develop standards for well-ventilated rooms in which it is safe to congregate for prolonged periods of time. Community leaders may develop early warning systems that allow for timely interventions. Policy-makers need to find solutions to the competing jurisdictions between private and public bodies, and between different levels of government. They also need to incentivise efforts to find effective treatments. Health professionals may develop testing regimes that are quick and reliable and allow targeted responses. Global institutions need to ensure that resources to fight the pandemic are distributed fairly among countries. Pressure groups could campaign against the rent-seeking behaviour of big pharma. In sum, the governance of Covid-19 is something that needs to be established as a problem. Only when it is recognized as such will we be able to get away from an important but overly narrow definition of the problem, and open new avenues for intervention.

References:

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Reiner Grundmann is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK). He holds a first degree in Sociology (FU Berlin), a PhD in Social and Political Sciences (EUI Florence), and a Habilitation from Bielefeld University. He has a long-standing interest in social theory, sustainability issues and global environmental problems. His current focus is the relation between knowledge and decision making. He has published on the nature of expertise in contemporary societies in various journal articles, and this is also the topic of his forthcoming book, Making Sense of Expertise. For Frontiers in Climate, he is chief editor of the special section Climate and Decision Making.

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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Grundmann, Reiner 2021. ‘Covid, Expertise, and Society: Stepping out of the Shadow of Epidemiology?’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (3):