Since this topic came up in our CCS program monitoring (course review) session today, I think it would be useful for people to know that there is considerable opposition on campuses to involvement on the part of university staff in the dirty work of the UK Border Police. Below I reproduce the Academic Union’s recent motion from our most recent branch meeting, and after that a separate, but related campaign by Goldsmiths’ own A. Gormley and a few others that – unrelatedly but endearingly – follows up on one of the initiatives suggested at the Sonic Diaspora Beyond Borders Beyond Text workshop we held in CCS in November. I comment without needing to make the obvious references to how well this racist points-based immigration system worked out in Fortress Australia:
Motion: New Home Office regulations (overwhelmingly carried, 12/2/09)
We wish to express our opposition to the new Home Office regulations, introduced under the new points-based system for immigration to the UK, that will require lecturers to monitor international students and to report any absences from seminars, lectures and tutorials, as well as any failure to submit assessment on time. We are opposed to these regulations for the following reasons.
First, they represent a possible breach of Article 8 (the right to privacy) and Article 3 (degrading treatment) of the European Convention of Human Rights and the 1998 Human Rights Act.
Second, such regulations will harm the relationship of trust between students and lecturers that is a vital aspect of doing our jobs which, fundamentally, should be helping students to learn. The regulations, in effect, treat international students as though they are potential suspects who have come to the UK with the specific goal of abusing the immigration system. We feel that this is discriminatory as the Home Office regulations apply only to non-EU students. We also wish to point out that the existing procedures of applying for a student visa requires students to be accepted at an accredited UK institution and, as such, already address the concerns and bogus schools that apparently have motivated the new rules.
Third, the work involved in monitoring international students will add unnecessarily to our workloads, in addition to our regular teaching, administrative and pastoral duties.
Furthermore, we note the passing of a motion in 2008 by Goldsmiths Students Union encouraging staff not to comply with the new rules.
For these reasons, this meeting agrees
1. To affirm its opposition to the new Home Office regulations;
2. To request details of the specific plans the University is making with
regard to the implementation of these regulations;
3. To ask members not to commence implementation of these regulations until these details are made clear to members, and the human rights and workload issues are appropriately dealt with.
The Piece from The Observer contained a final paragraph gem of doublethink: ‘A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “We want the United Kingdom to stay open and attractive for creative artists. But at the same time we are determined to deliver a system of border security which is among the most secure in the world.”‘ But the article at least started off lauding the efforts of the artists. For those who think that its not just artists who need to be defended from these draconian rules, it was helpfully pointed out to me that in the new cultural economy we are all “Artists” now. I guess that hype might work. Here are the first few paragraphs of this article:
Top artists battle visa clampdown
- The Observer, Sunday 22 February 2009
Antony Gormley is leading major arts figures in an attack on security controls which prevent star international performers from entering the UK
The visa legislation has tightened up the requirements for all professionals travelling to Britain from outside the EU in order to perform or take part in an arts event. Artists must now not only show proof of their identity, including fingerprints, but also show they have an established sponsor happy to take full financial responsibility for them and to vouch for all their activities while on British soil. Small organisations must pay a fee of £400 to become an official “sponsor”, while larger groups must pay £1,000.
Leading figures from the art world, including Antony Gormley and Nicholas Hytner, have launched a campaign to reverse stringent visa controls which they claim are preventing top foreign musicians, actors and artists from visiting Britain.
They say that immigration laws introduced last year are restricting artistic freedom and have called on the Home Office to review them.
One example they give is that of the virtuoso Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who cancelled what was to be his second performance in this country at the Southbank Centre in London when he could not provide the documents required for his planned visit in April.
“This country has always been a hub, an airy place where people from all over the world could come and express themselves in art,” said actress Janet Suzman, one of the signatories of a petition calling for the Home Office to look at the rules again. “This legislation stamps on all that with a clunking, hobnail boot”…
An ‘airy place’ thats been ’stomped on’. – just how artists speak I’m sure. But however they say what they say, they are at least not as scary as those who would deliver a world’s most secure arts sector. Its a laugh a minute in the museum of democracy. Sign me up now.
An abstract for a talk at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, ‘Television in India’ conference - July 14-15 2009 – Shimla
My mother was pretty much an unreconstructed (though we made the effort) anglophile, despite having lived 54 of her 65 years in Australia, but for sure she would have been wholeheartedly supportive of Vera Lynn’s current dalliance with the legal process. All salute Vera Lynn, at 91 still doing the job for an anti-fascist Britain (lest we forget):
Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option
Laura and I finished our article on BSG – called ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar’. We decided we have a whole other chapter on Gaius’s sex life, so we excised this bit. For the record: Robots are sexy – the False Maria, the pleasure-bot in Bladerunner, 7 of 9, and the seductions of Caprica 6 that lead Gaius astray. Gaius in the ménage, Gaius pining, Giaus as parent? Gaius is a flawed hero, and his exile amongst the Cylons after the attack on New Caprica a farcical consequence of his pathetic despot-like complicity. A puppet and play thing of his masters. Aboard the base-star his exile involves him pleasuring himself with his assigned captors, not one but two of the female fashion-mag ‘skin-jobs’ in a sumptuous bed. Gaius imagines he might be Cylon, he might be their leader (he is even more deluded than Louis Boneparte). He cavorts with the sex-bot machine girls in the idle fantasy of teen-male SF fans everywhere. Patriarchal and sexist, in the end we are all rooting for his downfall. Then he becomes a free sex cult god. Go figure. He’ll have to die ingloriously at the end (no, this is not a spoiler – we really have no idea how Gaius will end up, but I expect it will be bad).
Goldsmiths Students Occupy Deptford Town Hall!
I’ve been searching through the remnants of my old vinyl collection and my first records, including the classic ‘hooks album “Living in the Seventies”, whose lyrics, somewhat sadly, say it all.
I have always been more amazed that London cannot cope with mildly warm temperatures like 30 Celsius, than I am that everything stops also for snow. Mind you, it is a lot of snow I reckon, and well cold, so I am only going outside to build a snowperson, and to join the occasional impromptu snowball fight that happens on my street when pedestrians venture by. College, bless em, shut up shop at the first sign of weather. As this letter attests [editorial comments mine]: