|
|
 |
| |
Camden Town’s Irish Centre was awash with colourful costumes on Sunday as hundreds attended a Muslim wedding at the venue |
Minister’s remarks border on old racism
IT was the stretched limo and the line of women in gorgeous colourful costumes hugging the edge of the pavement that caught my eye.
I realised I had stumbled on a wedding. Hindu, Muslim? I didn’t know which, but I soon discovered that in fact the Irish Centre in Camden Town was the venue on Sunday afternoon for a Muslim wedding – the bride from Elm Village, the groom from Sheffield. And the hundreds of guests filling the tables in the main hall probably from around the borough.
I could only stand and soak in the atmosphere – almost with a sense of marvel – as the waiters swept past me ladened down with trays of food for the 40 tables that filled the McManara Hall.
At each table sat 10 guests. And that was only the first shift! After they had finished, apparently, hundreds more would take their place for the second shift.
Here, I felt, was a bit of a reincarnation of the old Empire, the older guests no doubt from the Indian sub-continent, the younger, mainly teenagers, Camdenites in speech and manner.
I couldn’t help thinking of our new minister for borders and immigration, Phil Woolas, who this week stressed the importance of controlling the inflow of immigrants. He didn’t say who he meant by the word “immigrants”.
But this is obviously a coded word for describing people from Asia and Africa, those of a darker skin. He certainly didn’t mean Europeans. Those from eastern Europe, of course, have a right to come here under EU rules that Britain signed up to, possibly too eagerly some may think.
Critics say Woolas is pandering to the xenophobic wing of popular thought, trying to head off support for extremist parties, and perhaps they’ve got a point.
Logically, borders need to be controlled. But, one-sidedly, the facts and arguments are marshalled against those from outside Europe.
The NHS, under New Labour, has done its best in the past year to downgrade Asian doctors, even to refuse them permanent hospital posts.
Once, asylum seekers who failed to convince the authorities their lives were at risk at home would be deported in a fairly dignified way, if that’s possible. Today, families, including little children, languish for months in detention centres, before being handcuffed and bundled into planes.
At one time the old Empire served a purpose. It helped to make Britain rich. In both world wars in the past century Africans and Asians fought for democracy alongside our forces, thousands died on the battlefields.
Some of the older guests at the wedding on Sunday may have once served in our forces for all I know. But in the eyes of Woolas they are simply “immigrants”.
Rhyme and reasons to teach kids poetry
HIS name rang a bell. Where had I heard it before? Then a guest at my table reminded me that his father, Baden Prince, used to be the borough’s race chief in the 1970s when the politics of race in Camden stirred minds. In those days the writer Salman Rushdie, who lived in Kentish Town, served on the borough-wide Community Relations Council.
The son, Baden Prince Junior, who had arrived as a fellow guest at a Caribbean party held at the Irish Centre in Camden Town on Sunday (see page 21), charmed everyone with his stylish poems.
A man of many parts, Baden Prince takes poetry into classrooms to inspire children, deadened by too much TV and internet distractions to take up reading. Illiteracy among school children is at an alarming level, he told me.
His father left England in the mid-70s, disheartened by the racial divide, and settled down in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific where he runs a small business.
‘Hoodie’ writer’s a goodie!
HISTORY will attribute David Cameron’s “Hug a Hoodie” speech to the blushing Tory leader, but the true originator of that oratory was his speechwriter, Danny Kruger.
It was the same Kruger who was punched by a hoodie some months later in Camden Town, to the delight of the national press, and the same Kruger who has now renounced smooth political promises in favour of grassroots youth work in King’s Cross.
At the beginning of November young offenders will star in a new play, Any Which Way, which they have written with Kruger.
Only Connect UK, the charity he founded with his wife Emma, uses theatre as a tool for rehabilitation.
I think there’s something very satisfying about the idea of this Eton-educated Tory getting in touch with the street yoof; that he has traded the company of Cameron and his acolytes for the hoodies of his rhetoric.
About blooming time too!
I CAUGHT up with Dame Hilary Blume this week to congratulate her on her honour.
Ms Blume, who lives in Hampstead Village, collected her Damehood from Prince Charles last week and told me she was surprised to be honoured after years of campaigning against poverty and injustice as the director of the Charities Advisory Trust.
“This is one for the awkward squad,” she told me proudly.
She was first up in front of 100 others who were to meet the Prince – but she wasn’t too nervous. “My children say I have had a by-pass when it comes to the embarrassment gene,” she said. “I am embarrassed by world poverty, not this.”
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
