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Jeff Nichols est fan d'”Un Monde Parfait”, Joseph Gordon Levitt et Channing Tatum sont des Vilains Messieurs, Halle Berry en télé-opératrice dans The Call…
Jeff Nichols s’est inspiré d’Un monde parfait pour Mud – Sur les rives du Mississippi, Joseph Gordon-Levitt et Channing Tatum sont des Vilains Messieurs, Robert Downey Jr. nous parle de Sherlock Holmes 3, Halle Berry en télé-opératrice dans The Call…
Découvrez la minute du lundi 29 avril 2013 !
La Minute
Trompée par l’homme qu’elle aimait et qu’elle a accompagné jusqu’au pouvoir, Valérie Trierweiler se trompe à son tour, en ne cessant de régler ses comptes. Nous lui préconisons de révéler la belle personne qu’elle est sans doute, mais qu’elle cache encore sous le masque de la vindicte.
A cinquante ans, elle semble en pleine maîtrise de sa féminité. Grâce présidentielle d’un certain François H. qui embrasse comme on offre le baiser du condamné, mais – la preuve avec Ségolène Royal auparavant – finit par délivrer les femmes qu’il mal étreint de leur air renfrogné ? Il y a les contes de fées, et le compte des faits.
Primo, Valérie Trierweiler n’est pas moins jolie qu’une certaine actrice. Perchée sur ses talons de douze centimètres, elle pensait prendre de la hauteur sur les petits conseillers aux chaussures bien cirées, mais à l’éthique moins reluisante, du palais élyséen. Derrière les fenêtres du 55, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, elle n’a rien vu venir de la pourtant proche et bien nommée rue du Cirque. Drapée dans des robes cache-coeur, elle croyait se cuirasser contre le curare des plumes assassines et nouer un peu plus fort un lien amoureux qu’elle sentait déjà se défaire. Assommée de tranquillisants, elle a fini seule, sanglée, dans une chambre de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, après la terrible révélation de sa répudiation. Il n’en fallait pas plus pour l’inciter à opérer une révolution derrière son paravent d’infortunes. Ainsi, comme au sortir d’un deuil, Valérie opte désormais pour des coupes, plus fluides, et des couleurs, plus claires, qui siéent davantage à sa silhouette et sa liberté retrouvées. Auréolée d’un blond miel depuis trois mois, elle nous rappellerait presque Grace Kelly dans La Main au Collet. Si seulement sa main à elle n’avait pas souffleté un malotru dans un café du 15e arrondissement parisien, début mars. Mais classons l’affaire comme le parquet de Paris.
Deuxio, Valérie Trierweiler n’a pas moins d’entregent qu’une certaine femme de réseau. Les salons de l’Elysée, qui ont étouffé plus d’un cri et chuchotement depuis que le pouvoir français s’y est installé en 1848, la tenaient au devoir de réserve. Elle a ré-ouvert en grand son salon de conversations, dans l’hebodmadaire Paris Match, qui célèbre le poids des mots depuis plus de six décennies. Il s’y presse du beau monde. Pour Valérie, fini la politique, c’est désormais “lettres ou le néant”. Récemment, l’écrivain new-yorkais Douglas Kennedy a retweeté un article qu’elle lui consacrait. Titre de la chronique: “un amour bâti sur du sable”. Qui de l’une, à la recherche de son honneur perdu, ou de l’autre, auteur des romans Rien ne va plus, Une relation dangereuse et L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, a été le plus inspiré par l’échange? Peu importe. Merci pour ce moment de connivence.
Tertio, Valérie Trierweiler n’est pas moins capable de sensibiliser l’opinion qu’une certaine productrice. Les “sans-dents”, l’ex-Première dame, qui n’en aura finalement pas été une, a choisi de les accompagner dans leur quotidien, plutôt que de les montrer à l’écran, dans des documentaires comme Les Prolos et Petites mains, ou, des fictions comme Jusqu’au bout et Mon ami Pierrot. Certes, chacun s’engage à la hauteur de ses moyens. Mais personne ne peut nier l’activisme, physique et numérique, de Valérie, toujours prête à battre le pavé et l’écran tactile de son smartphone, en faveur du Secours Populaire ou des 200 lycéennes nigérianes enlevées par le groupe islamiste armé Boko Aram. Son père, invalide civil de guerre, est mort, alors qu’elle n’avait que vingt-et-un ans. Veuve, sa mère fut contrainte de trimer en tant qu’hôtesse d’accueil de la patinoire d’Angers. C’est dire comme elle sait l’importance de crier la vie, quand tout est réduit au silence. Remercions-la pour cela aussi.
Alors, quoi, comment expliquer qu’à ce jour, aucun homme ne se soit affiché à son bras? Hormis Alain Delon, vieux guépard du cinéma français, qui, reniflant sa solitude, sollicita une rencontre, rien de bien fameux, rien qui ne fasse palpiter la presse du coeur.
Aussi, nous aimerions adresser ces quelques conseils à notre consoeur.
D’abord, il faut oublier ce François. L’affront fut de taille. Jamais une femme n’aura été autant humiliée dans l’histoire de la Ve République. Mais à quoi bon souffrir davantage? Ecoulé à plus de 750 000 exemplaires, Merci pour ce moment fut sans doute une saignée nécessaire. On doute, par contre, que son interview parue le 12 mai dans Le Parisien ou que son tweet publié le 26 mai avec mention d’un article du Monde sur les “trois escapades par semaine” de notre président soient autant de rappels indispensables de sa condition de femme bafouée. On ne parle même pas de l’adaptation cinématographique de son livre, produite par son amie Saïda Jawad. Les salles obscures sont déjà pleines de drames sentimentaux. Il faut voir la vie devant soi, Valérie.
Ensuite, il faudrait se montrer davantage accessible et disponible. S’envoler à Bombay avec Charlotte Valandrey pour donner un coup de projecteur sur le programme Fight Hunger, fut fort estimable. Oublier la grisaille parisienne sous le soleil de l’île Maurice avec Valérie de Senneville, épouse Sapin, et Saïda Jawad, d’accord, pourquoi pas. Mais quelque chose nous dit que faire la fête au Banana Café, temple des nuits gay parisiennes, ne doit pas faciliter les rencontres. La posture de la femme forte, qui tient encore debout, le poing levé, c’est bien. Mais un peu de tendresse dans ce monde de brutes, ça ne se refuse pas, Valérie.
Enfin, il faudrait préciser ses attentes. Egoïsme, manipulation, perversion, lâcheté… Dans Merci pour ce moment, l’ex-compagne de François H. a listé tout ce qu’elle ne souhaitait plus d’un homme. On lui propose la rédaction d’un deuxième tome, qu’elle pourrait intituler Merci pour la suite et dans laquelle elle nous dresserait le portrait de son amoureux idéal. Cet homme capable, comme elle, d’enfourcher un vélo, de voyager au bout du monde ou de s’intéresser à l’oeuvre de Marc Lévy. Un aventurier en somme. Mais cette fois, un vrai.
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“Zulu” de Jérôme Salle est présenté en film de clôture de cette 66ème édition du Festival de Cannes. Rencontre avec l’équipe du film.
Zulu de Jérôme Salle est présenté en clôture de cette 66ème édition du Festival de Cannes. Rencontre avec Orlando Bloom, content de casser son image “trop lisse”, Forest Whitaker de retour à Cannes après son prix pour Bird (1988) et avec le metteur en scène Jérôme Salle.
Toutes les news sur le Festival de Cannes 2013
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Justin Bieber et Selena Gomez ont eu une relation longue et tumultueuse, à présent bel et bien terminée. Mais la jeune chanteuse ne semble pas avoir oublié son premier amour puisqu’il lui a inspiré son nouveau titre.
Selon les dires de Stevie Mackey, son coach vocal, Selena Gomez s’est inspirée de Justin Bieber pour sa dernière chanson. Les deux artistes ont vécu une relation amoureuse de plusieurs années, se séparant et revenant l’un vers l’autre à de nombreuses reprises.
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Son coach a déclaré au site HollywoodLife.com qu’“elle ne le mentionne pas directement. Mais tout le monde peut deviner qu’elle chante à son sujet. Beaucoup d’artistes évoquent leurs relations actuelles ou passées dans leur musique. Selena n’est pas différente.” Il s’agit en effet d’une nouvelle peu surprenante puisque Justin Bieber a partagé la vie de la chanteuse de 22 ans pendant quatre ans et fût son premier amour.
Le 10 juin, la jeune femme a laissé entendre qu’elle travaillait sur cette nouvelle musique en postant sur son compte Instagram une photo d’elle accompagnée des auteurs-compositeurs Justin Tranter et Julia Michaels. Ce cliché s’accompagne de la légende: « C’est une équipe magique ».
En 2014, Selena Gomez avait déjà interprété un morceau intitulé The Heart Wants what It wants, revenant sur son histoire d’amour avec l’interprète de Baby. Au début de l’année 2015, elle a enregistré une chanson avec son nouveau petit ami, Zedd, dont elle s’est séparée depuis.
De son côté, Justin Bieber a confié à Seacrest s’être lui aussi inspiré de son ex pour son prochain album. « Je pense qu’une grande partie de mon inspiration vient de Selena » a t-il raconté. “Nous avons eu une longue relation composée de peine, de joie et de beaucoup d’émotions que je voulais partager.” Il a confirmé son célibat et déclaré en être heureux.
Crédits photos : JB Lacroix / Getty
Triste ironie, c’est mercredi après-midi, jour des enfants, qu’on a appris le décès d’Henri Bon, le célèbre facteur de L’île aux enfants. Il avait 80 ans.
«Un gros nuage noir vient de cacher le soleil de notre île… Notre gentil facteur Émile Campagne, le messager des bonnes nouvelles, s’en est allé cette nuit distribuer le courrier chez les Anges… Là où tu vas Émile, les enfants de l’île te souhaitent un bon voyage… Tu nous manques déjà…». C’est par ces quelques mots postés sur la page officielle de Casimir sur Facebook qu’on a appris ce mercredi après-midi le décès d’Henri Bon.
Son nom n’est peut-être pas très connu du grand public, mais lorsqu’on évoque celui du facteur de L’île aux enfants, le regard de toute une génération d’enfants s’illumine. Tous ceux qui, dans les années 70, n’auraient raté pour rien au monde un épisode de Casimir à l’heure du goûter se souviennent avec émotion de ce facteur au visage rond et à la langue bien pendue qui ponctuait ses phrases avec l’expression « Pour sûr ». Avec François, Julie et monsieur du Snob, Henri Bon faisait partie des acteurs en chair et en os qui vivaient de drôles d’aventures aux côtés de Casimir, son cousin Hyppolite et Léonard le renard.
L’île aux enfants a été diffusée de 1974 à 1982 et fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’un véritable culte. Lorsque le programme a disparu de l’antenne, Henri Bon a été embauché pour jouer dans Le village dans les nuages, cousin éloigné créé lui aussi par Christophe Izard. Il avait fait ses débuts au cinéma en 1963 dans La cuisine au beurre, avec Fernandel et Bourvil. Après les émissions pour enfants, on a ensuite pu voir l’acteur dans quelques films adaptés des romans de Marcel Pagnol. Puis il s’est retiré des plateaux de tournage pour s’installer en Provence où il s’occupait de confiseries. C’est un vent de nostalgie qui souffle ce soir sur les enfants de la télé.
Crédits photos : GALMICHE/TF1/SIPA
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En pleine crise avec son époux Jamie Hince, Kate Moss a des vues sur un autre Anglais : David Beckham.
Kate Moss a le beguin pour David Beckham. C’est dit. C’est au cours d’une interview avec le magazine anglais Stylist qu’elle a avoué vouloir se retrouver à la place de Victoria Beckham pour une seule raison : son mari. Le top, , a craqué pour l’ex-footballeur. Qui ne le ferait pas ?
David Beckham représente l’archétype du père de famille et du mari idéal. Toujours présent pour les siens, il est leur pilier et les soutient dans leurs entreprises. Avec son aide, Victoria Beckham a réussi à poser les premières pierres de son empire fashion grâce à une marque éponyme pleine de succès et saluée par la critique. Surtout, après quelques crises, le couple semble aujourd’hui plus que jamais heureux au bout de seize ans de mariage et quatre enfants : Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz et la petite dernière Harper. Oui, qui ne craquerait pas pour un homme aussi fort, drôle et plein de vie ? Sans compter son physique d’Apollon. On comprend totalement Kate Moss.
Cependant, Posh n’a absolument aucun souci à se faire. Début juillet, le couple fêtait son anniversaire de mariage en compagnie de sa progéniture. Un bonheur familial communiqué sur les réseaux sociaux, prouvant la solidité de leur union. Kate, il faudra passer son tour.
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Italian fashion brand Officina Borbonese partnered with Parsons Paris,
the European Branch of Parsons School of Design in New York City, for an
exclusive project. Parsons Paris and Parsons New York students in the
Fashion Design and Strategic Design and Management programs will create a
project that will have as its main inspiration the ancestral handmade
textiles of Sardinia.
The Fashion Design students will design a special edition bag,
associated with a complete ready to wear outfit for the Fall/Winter 2021
collection. Strategic Design and Management students will analyze the
brand’s existing marketing and positioning practices to make strategic
recommendations and propose entry strategies for new markets. They will
also develop a creative marketing campaign for the launch of the bag
designed by Fashion Design students.
“We thought that a real dialogue with the new generations can be
established only by having a concrete exchange with them,” says Francesca
Mambrini, owner of Borbonese. “The relationship with the students at
fashion schools, young people who love fashion, who live it on a daily
basis, studying it and learning its profound mechanisms, can only generate
new vital sap for our brand that increasingly wants to address a new and
aware public.”
The project, called Savoy Faire, will see the Borbonese team and Parsons
Paris students discussing each other at an artistic, technical and
strategic level on several occasions to give students the opportunity to
fully understand the interplay between a brand and business dynamics. The
student team that proposes the most innovative Management project will be
awarded an internship in the company’s Communication department in Milan,
while the selected Design project will be produced in Italy and featured in
the Borbonese Fall Winter 2021 collection.
Photos: via Parsons Paris
Over Christmas, the Deliveroo app was offering ‘midwives’ alongside Wagamama and Dixy Chicken. The promotion had a photo of a nurse checking a baby in an incubator, a 4.8 out of 5 rating and a dodgy pun on ‘delivery’.
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This turned out to be part of a Christmas advertising campaign that aimed to “shine a light on everyday heroes” – the underpaid, overworked hospital staff holding up our collapsing social infrastructure.
If platforms like Deliveroo really care about carers, they could pay their workers enough to feed their kids, provide sick pay and parental leave or even just pay social security contributions. But this seems unlikely given a large part of their business model is based on avoiding these costs.
Deliveroo isn’t the first platform to spot an opportunity to profit from care work. In the past ten years, we have seen a growing industry of digital platforms (including Care.com, Handy, Taskrabbit and Helpling) designed to mediate the work – known as ‘reproductive labour’ – traditionally performed by women for low or no wages. These tasks include birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family, cooking, cleaning, shopping and repairing.
Venture capitalists have realised that there’s money in mums.
A large study of platform work by Ursula Huw in 2017 found that 23.8% of UK households purchase household services from online platforms at least once a year. Until recently the mainstream story of the platform economy has been one of ‘Uberisation’, focusing on the largely male ride-hailing and delivery workforces. This has erased the experiences of huge numbers of women and migrants doing low-income home service work through platforms.
Dalia Gebrial argues that changes to working relations brought about by digital platforms are fundamentally structured by racialised and gendered histories of labour in these sectors. This is reflected in Mateescu and Ticona’s interviews with nannies, cleaners and elder care workers which draw attention to new forms of digitally-enabled abuse and discrimination. Niels Van Doorn has also identified barriers to worker organising within platformised domestic work, including the fear of increased visibility for those with insecure immigration status, and the feminised guilt involved in striking from care.
The rise of these platforms since the financial crash has taken place not just in the context of a crisis of work, where employment is increasingly precarious and low-paid, but also a crisis of care. Uber’s business model involves exploiting gaps in underfunded public transport infrastructure, testing on-demand mass transit in cities across America. In the same way, care platforms seek to plug the care deficit created by the dismantling of public services; people working longer hours for less money; and a housing crisis that has ripped apart neighbourhood networks of care.
The UK’s childcare sector is a good illustration of the way the ‘platformisation’ of certain types of work plays a role in wider social and political agendas such as austerity and privatisation. Over a third of families in poverty in the UK are forced into debt to pay for childcare, as fees have gone up three times faster than wages since 2008. 17% of childcare providers in the UK’s poorest areas are facing closure and ‘top-up fees’ for nappies, meals and trips mean that the 15-30 hours of free childcare has never really been free.
As the government actively discourages local councils from providing childcare, we have seen a proliferation of for-profit global ‘super chains’ in the sector. One of the UK’s fastest growing is Busy Bees, which currently cares for 50,000 children in over 500 nurseries. With a Canadian pension firm as their majority shareholder, the chain has a strategy to “accelerate global growth, opening settings in China, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada and the US”. Aggressive expansion may be good for business, but it’s disastrous for building sustainable social infrastructures like nurseries. When Australian company ABC Learning Centres (who previously owned Busy Bees) had similar ambitions to go global in 2008, it got itself into so much debt that it collapsed.
Busy Bees’ main rival, private equity-backed Bright Horizons, is looking to expand not just geographically but also into other services. Last year, Bright Horizons acquired a platform called My Family Care that “combines innovative technology and practical solutions for the modern workplace”. They partner with IBM, Proctor and Gamble, and hundreds of other companies to book over 50,000 days of care a year for their employers.
Another company, Care.com, has also branched out into ‘back-up care’ with a new service called [email protected] offering big employers access to their global pool of 12 million care providers through their mobile app or website.
What is striking is how these childcare platforms explicitly promote themselves as a silver bullet for the crisis of social reproduction. The [email protected] website describes the challenges faced daily by families across the UK when caring arrangements break down and there is no state-sponsored safety net: “School is closed. A child is sick. A parent breaks a hip. The nanny goes on vacation. A spouse has surgery. Life happens.” The pitch to these companies is that unexpected caring responsibilities damage productivity (“productivity wants up, absenteeism wants down and top talent wants in”) and therefore damage profit. This is framed as a feminist project, a way of “promoting more women to leadership positions.”
The issue is that back-up care platforms don't actually tackle the risks that arise when caring arrangements break down. They just shift that risk onto working class migrant women on zero hours contracts with no protections who struggle to look after their own kids and elderly relatives. Feminist ‘empowerment’ isn’t about rich women working longer hours so they get promoted to senior management – it’s about people of all genders, class and race having more time to take on caring responsibilities.
Platforms can exacerbate exploitative working conditions in the care sector, but they also have implications for the quality of care. As platforms closely monitor and track workers, care work becomes more task-focused and quantified, making it harder to meet the needs of individuals. The ‘on-demand’ model where an algorithm matches you with a stranger also makes it harder to develop longer-term caring relationships which are vital to quality care, both for children and adults.
Increasingly, researchers and policymakers are paying attention to the rise of platforms for reproductive work, but it is a mistake to assume that recommendations for how to improve the lives of these workers must be digital too. By focusing on technical tweaks to the platform design (for example, two-way rating systems or an hourly wage), campaigns often fail to situate these changes within a broader social and political agendas.
Recommendations should instead start with the systemic changes needed to tackle the crisis of care: universal free care provision, collective sectoral bargaining for care and domestic workers, a shorter working week, and more. Only then should policymakers ask what role digital technologies might play in making these changes happen.
Case studies such as the Ugly Mugs app, designed by sex workers to identify dangerous clients, the digitised Buurtzog model of community care in the Netherlands, or the platform cooperatives being built by the Self Employed Women’s Association in India offer a blueprint for this. There is nothing wrong with platforms themselves, but there is something seriously wrong with platforms that introduce extractive business models to our caring relations.
In the case of Uber, we know that the company’s ambitions go beyond merely plugging gaps in patchy public infrastructure – it wants to have strategic control over the design and organisation of that infrastructure. The same seems to be true of care platforms. Care.com has already attempted to influence regulations in America with the establishment of the Care Institute which aims to “leverage the company’s data and reach to drive systemic change across the care economy as a whole”. Their expansion into training programmes (including digital skills training) aims to increase standardisation and quality of employment, but it will also put them in a stronger strategic position to roll out their gig economy model across the sector.
Back in the UK, the Scottish government recently funded Care Sourcer, a carer comparison and matching site, to partner with the NHS on care provision. They claim to be “tackling one of society’s greatest challenges” with technology that “has the potential to scale and transform the care sector”. This is part of a broader trend of the public sector becoming increasingly reliant on private tech firms to run ‘smarter’ essential services (from transportation to criminal justice) because they lack the expertise or resources to develop the software on their own. This kind of digital outsourcing often goes under the radar but it is just another chapter in the stealthy privatisation of public services that has been going on since the 1980s.
Political theorist Langdon Winner sees technologies as “a way of building order into our world”. This can help us think about the way that digital platforms introduce a new structuring logic to our reproductive arrangements as a society. If that platform is owned by a venture capital backed company looking to make as much money for shareholders as possible, it will inevitably restructure these arrangements in a way that makes it possible to accelerate the marketisation of care.
This is what venture capitalists do – they speculate on our futures. They place bets on particular technologies and business models by guessing (and therefore shaping) what our lives will look like in ten or twenty years. In the struggle over social reproduction, if we want to reject their version of the future, we also need to start speculating.
Silicon Valley start-ups may have realised there is ‘money in mums’. But there is also power in mums, just as there is power in grandparents and other unpaid carers, in home care workers, in nursery staff and in nannies, if we organise to build a collective voice in the fight for care.
Chinese technology giant Huawei is in discussions to pay the London School of Economics to study “leadership” in the development of 5G technology. The LSE approved the project despite internal concerns about taking the controversial firm’s money.
Internal LSE documents seen by openDemocracy show that in September a committee that monitors the ethics of gifts and donations to the university approved a three-year project worth £105,000 funded by Huawei. The ethical approval was given despite staff concerns that the tech giant could present its links with LSE as an endorsement.
LSE has said that it has not made a final decision on whether to go ahead with the Huawei project but it is not the only concern about the university’s foreign funding to be raised recently.
Last year the university was forced to “put on hold” a proposed China programme. The would-be funder was a staunchly pro-Beijing venture capitalist who had previously defended the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the plan was shelved after the university’s academics expressed outrage.
Criticism of Huawei’s courting of LSE has sharpened after the company successfully lobbied to be involved in the UK’s new 5G mobile communications network, a move that infuriated Washington, which sees the company as a security risk.
MPs and a senior China specialist at LSE have heavily criticised the university and called for new procedures to protect academic freedom in the UK from Chinese influence and prevent attempts to silence international criticism of Beijing.
“Chinese companies are deliberately seeking well-respected UK universities to launder their reputation,” Labour MP Chris Bryant told openDemocracy. LSE would be “daft” to cooperate with Huawei, Bryant added.
The internal LSE documents seen by openDemocracy described the Huawei funding as “A proposed three-year consultancy project donation of £105k from Huawei.”
It explains: “The project is to provide a comprehensive study on how Huawei has internally supported innovation and product development in the past twenty years, focusing upon the transition from 2G infrastructure to technology leadership in 5G and governance, incentive and innovation at Huawei.”
LSE confirmed that its ethics committee had approved the Huawei transaction, which it described as a research contract. However, commercial discussions were continuing, it said, and no final agreement or payment had been made.
A spokesman said: "This proposed project remains under discussion. LSE has a clear ethics code which requires due diligence to be undertaken for all partnerships, which is kept under regular review."
The documents also reveal that last June a group of four senior academics whose work focuses on Asia, met with LSE director Minouche Shafik to warn of “increasing risks to the School's reputation of exposure to China.
“Particularly pressing is the need for a rigorous and meaningful review of the Confucius Institute for Business, the [Peking University] summer school… and the ethical implications of having joint MSc programmes with institutions in which academic freedom is increasingly constrained by the Chinese Communist Party,” the academics said in their letter.
Christopher Hughes, professor of international relations at LSE and a former director of the university's Asia Research Centre, said that the university has continually failed to inform academics about its Chinese work.
“LSE’s approach is to freeze out the academics. The people who work on China are the last ones to be told about these projects,” said Hughes, who was among the academics who brought their concerns about LSE’s exposure to China to Shafik.
“The key thing is, ‘Do we have the right procedures in place to protect our integrity?’ My view is we don’t,” Hughes told openDemocracy.
Boris Johnson’s decision to allow Huawei to build part of the British 5G network as long as it is restricted to ‘non-core’ infrastructure was heavily criticised by US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. A number of high-profile Conservative MPs have also voiced strong criticism.
The debate has drawn attention to the role that Chinese interests play elsewhere in the UK. Huawei itself has close links with a number of British universities, including a £25 million collaboration with the University of Cambridge.
Last year, Oxford placed a ban on accepting research grants from Huawei following “public concerns raised in recent months surrounding UK partnerships with Huawei”.
Commenting on openDemocracy’s LSE revelations, Stewart McDonald, the Scottish National Party defence spokesperson, said: “Huawei is an instrument of a repressive, communist government that has global reach when it comes to attempting to silence criticism of its actions at home.
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“Universities must be especially cautious to defend academic freedom and ensure that they don’t allow themselves to be attack surfaces of the Chinese Communist Party in future – whether that’s economic, digital, informational or societal.”
Huawei told openDemocracy that the company is not “an arm of the Chinese state” and that it had been a victim of a “global propaganda campaign for the past fifteen or sixteen months.
“We have been operating in the UK for twenty years,” the spokesperson said. “We have partnerships with thirty UK universities.”
The LSE has a number of ventures in China, including joint academic degrees with Chinese universities such Peking University and Tsinghua University, and a long-running joint journalism degree with Fudan University. Chinese media is supervised by censorship authorities.
The internal documents seen by openDemocracy state that the LSE has been chasing philanthropic funding from China, and that it already receives funding for university research from the country. “Foundations and corporations from China have supported research and policy-oriented work among LSE academics,” the documents state.
“China and East Asia, in general, will be an important philanthropic market for LSE.”
LSE’s international tie-ups have been heavily criticised in the past. In 2011, a report by former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf found that the university was guilty of a “chapter of failures” over its links with the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya.
The school had accepted a £1.5 million gift from a foundation led by Gaddafi's son Saif, a former student. The LSE's commercial arm had also secured a contract worth £2.2 million to train Libyan civil servants.
Anthony Brown migrated from Jamaica to the United Kingdom (UK) in 1967 as a six year old child with his mother, two brothers and two sisters, to join his father recruited as a civil engineer. After returning to Jamaica in 1973 to finish secondary school at Jamaica College, Brown returned to the UK, reuniting with friends and family members who had remained. However, when applying for university in 1983, he was told by the Home Office that he wasn't British because his Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC) status had been revoked through the 1971 Immigration Act, as he had been out of the country for more than two years and that he should report to Manchester Airport to be deported.
When his story broke in the 1980s, Brown’s family, friends and community waged an “end deportation now” campaign by organising petitions, demonstrations, writing letters, eventually resulting in securing his status of ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’.
Brown was one of the first to be on the sharp end of Home Office policies that have, since the 1960’s, gradually been restricting the rights of Commonwealth citizens to live and work in the UK.
These restrictions culminated in the 2014 Immigration Act where the Conservative government legislated to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants, introducing a range of checks and controls on access to employment, services such as welfare benefits, the National Health Service (NHS), private renting, driving licences and bank accounts which did not take into account the undocumented status of many in the Caribbean diaspora living in the UK. This led to the Windrush Scandal where thousands of people were, in many cases unlawfully threatened with deportation, detained and deported from the UK.
Brown recalls, “I recognised the fear and distress people were experiencing in 2018 so we began a Windrush legal surgery in Manchester, as I could remember needing support myself.” Brown had coincidentally just graduated with a law degree, completed through the Open University 35 years after his first attempt to go to university.
The work of the weekly surgery, the Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C, is to support the transition of claimants to full citizenship under the Windrush Scheme and a further stage which considers compensation claims. The scheme was established in the aftermath of the scandal in August 2018 and Brown successfully regained his British Citizenship under it. Although through the process he recognised a lack of community infrastructure available for people in similar circumstances.
The surgery also operates as a forum where cases at the intersection of law and race are studied against the historical trajectory of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain. For Brown, it became clear from listening to the testimonies in the surgery that many people with the status of ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, including himself, have been haunted by the fear of detention and deportation, restricting movement and in many cases refusing to formally interact with the proposed fix of the Windrush Scheme.
Although it is stressed by the authorities the border will not be activated through contact with the Windrush Schemes application form, in many cases this fear or refusal is informed by experiences at the intersection of racism, state institutions and incarceration.
Brown describes what it was like to know that any encounter with the police which didn't go well could affect immigration status and lead to deportation. “When I was in my twenties driving, you got stopped so many times. You knew that it could go wrong, not for your fault, but because an officer was having a bad day and decided that you were going to be the one to get the rough end of the stick for that. You could see it happening with a lot of people who were just attacked by the police or stopped and harassed by the police. They would then get beaten up by the police, but they'd be charged for resisting arrest” recalls Brown.
A letter sent from the Home Office to the Home Affairs Committee on 23 July 2019 reported that 1,163 claimants from within the UK have been refused by the Windrush Scheme. This is consistent with many cases Brown has worked on in his legal surgery where claims have been refused as a result of prior convictions and others who are deemed to have fallen short of ‘good character’ requirements. The Home Office is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 which means spent convictions may enter into the decision making process.
The 1971 Immigration Act, modified in 1981, states that applicants must prove a level of ‘good character’ measured by the Home Office, in order to obtain British citizenship. Brown’s story of his racialised encounter with state authorities, which resonates with testimonies voiced in his legal surgery, raises questions as to the extent to which refusals have been based upon discriminatory measures of ‘good character’ or other circumstances that blur race with criminality. The Joint Committee on Human Rights reviewed what they describe as the government’s "heavy handed" approach when depriving people of British Citizenship in the application of ‘good character’ requirements, and whether this is contrary to their human rights under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 (ECHR). On July 25th 2019 the ‘Remedial Order’ removed the good character requirement for British citizenship in certain applications, although it is not clear whether this affects the refusals previously made by the Windrush Scheme.
Although statements made in Parliament by former Home Secretary MP Sajid Javid have claimed to offer full support for the Windrush Generation to transition to British citizenship, 1,163 refusals indicate there is still further work to be done. Therefore, despite the apparent goodwill of Javid’s statement, legally, the framing of ‘good character’ in the 1971 and 1981 Immigration Act has been used by the Home Office to prevent undocumented Commonwealth residents attaining citizenship. Brown claims that legislation must be revisited for alignment between the claims of the Windrush Scheme and the legal framework of the Home Office, in order for Javid’s statement in Parliament to be true. Until then, the lives of those people who have been refused citizenship are on hold and one begins to wonder whether this is to limit the compensation bill and prevent the dialogue spilling over into reparations.
Lead adviser to the design of the current Windrush Compensation Scheme, Martin Forde QC, argues that the social effects of being unlawfully refused citizenship, detained or deported can be priced into a compensation claim, however the sceptical approach to the current implementation of the scheme suggests that the government cannot be relied upon hence Anthony Brown’s adoption of the adage, “If you rely on the state, you will get in a state”. Therefore, Windrush Defenders have extended their community work from the legal surgery towards the support of Saturday schools (such as the Louisa Da-Cocodia Trust based in Moss Side, Manchester) whilst also making links with the Caribbean & African Health Network, Manchester Caribbean Business Forum and the Black and Asian Police Association.
Informed by testimonies in the legal surgery, this collaborative approach aims to create a formal body of research on discrimination in criminal justice, education, health, business and employment. This investigation is informed by a history which should not be considered as some kind of ethnic problem, but a critical historical account of how Britain was and continues to be constructed.
Parliament must ensure the law attunes to the injustice which permeates Brown’s story, the discriminatory use of ‘good character’, and the circumstances of the 1,163 refusals to the Windrush Scheme, to affirm the 'Windrush Generation' and their descendants settled in the UK can fairly transition to British citizenship. This is not to suggest that citizenship status is a definitive solution to this complex situation, but certainly the start of a necessary process of repairing the inequity at the intersection of race and British law.
The Black Cultural Archives (BCA) are holding a public meeting at Lambeth Town Hall for all those affected by the Windrush Scandal on Saturday 18th January 2020. This will be followed by free legal surgeries every Wednesday and Saturday from January 22 until the end of February to help people access the Windrush Compensation Scheme.