Who is Emma West?

The big viral YouTube hit of ten days ago was a clip of a woman on a south London tram unleashing a foul-mouthed tirade directed at immigrants and ethnic minorities, thereby upsetting a number of her fellow passengers. She did this with a young child balanced on her lap. We now know that she is 34-year old Emma West of New Addington in the London Borough of Croydon. 

Twitter: the mob rules?

The Daily Mail confirmed yesterday that West, having been charged some days ago with a racially aggravated public order offence, has now been remanded in custody until January 3rd. Bail was denied, with Magistrate Ian McNeal explaining that this was for West's own protection, the court having heard that she has received numerous death threats and that her address has been widely circulated on Facebook and Twitter.

However you feel about Ms. West's behaviour, it seems safe to assume that decent people will be repelled by  threats of this nature. As someone who has not yet submitted a plea for what was a non-violent offence, she would ordinarily have a good chance of spending Christmas at home while the wheels of justice are turning. But online social networks have been abused by those who would rather threaten violence than calmly watch due process being observed.

A story carried by the Croydon Advertiser last week seems to provide a further reason to worry about the role of social media in this affair. The article alleges that there was some interaction between British Transport Police officers and Ms. West immediately after her outburst but that she was only arrested once the incident had been viewed very widely on YouTube.

What sort of time lag are we talking about here? If the Croydon Advertiser piece is to be believed, the altercation on the tram may have occurred a full ten days before the video recording was first posted online.

Kerry Finch, someone claiming to be a close friend of Ms. West's, told the Advertiser that police were quickly made aware of the incident, with officers then removing her from the tram and waiting with her for another one. Finch has said that her friend was then accompanied to New Addington by these officers.

Ms. Finch feels that "the way the police have handled the situation is really poor". She may have a good point if, as she says, the BTP "were fully aware of what had happened at the time but... only decided to arrest [Ms. West] when everyone kicked up a fuss".

This account is at odds with comments from a BTP spokesman who, the Advertiser reports, "said it remained unclear when the incident took place and, therefore, whether anyone had reported it at the time".

Should Ms. Finch have correctly recollected the sequence of events, we may have a case of what looks ominously like mob rule: the police only deciding an alleged offence is serious once Twitter had lit up with expressions of outrage. If we give lawmakers and law enforcers the power to establish and maintain systems designed to ensure the smooth running of a civilised society, we might reasonably welcome any technology which complements the working of those systems. But if technology enables a sudden public outcry to take precedence over the usual processes we might have cause for concern.

You think you know Emma West?

What do we know about Emma West? On the day her awful behaviour was attracting widespread interest and much comment, nobody saying their piece knew this woman at all. The Croydon Advertiser, once again,  offers more information on the the suddenly notorious south Londoner than any of the national news outlets, giving us some detail of a history of depression and time spent in psychiatric care.

With this this mind, might those who direct threats and unmitigated bile towards Ms. West wish to reconsider their views? Sure, depression does not excuse lamentably aggressive and anti-social behaviour, but it may offer some explanation for why the villain of the YouTube clip failed to observe the usual unwritten rules of restraint and decency in public.

But even if we accept that there may be reasons not to condemn Ms. West quite so strongly for her failure to behave well, does that make the muddled views she tried to express any less abhorrent? More to the point, are her opinions actually abhorrent? Are her ideas out at the outer fringes of public opinion or does her hostility towards immigrants and non-white Britons sit somewhere in the mainstream?

A five-country European survey run by the Guardian in March suggests that further immigration to the UK is not broadly welcomed. Just 31% of the Britons polled agreed with the statement "I approve of people moving from one EU country to another so they can work and live." In the case of moving to the EU from the wider world, just 20% of UK respondents agreed with the corresponding statement.

So it seems that some elements of the sentiments expressed by Emma West are not wildly out of line with public opinion. this is my england, however, is sticking with the opinion put forward when first commenting on this dismal little incident, namely that berating non-white Britons and recent immigrants in an aggressive fashion and in a public setting is something that would not sit comfortably even for most people who oppose further immigration to the UK. The idea that a majority of people in the country would find Ms. West's behaviour acceptable is at odds with the day-to-day experience of living in what remains a fundamentally safe and decent country, whatever its flaws and whatever the stresses and strains being felt at a time of economic pessimism.

So Emma West appears to be a person some of whose views might not be a world away from the concerns of a population battered by relentless bad news about their pay, pensions, working conditions, job security and quality of life. But she seems to be someone whose other troubles around mental health have led her to express her concerns in a way that surely only very few of us would find acceptable.

The feeling here at this is my england is that even those who express similar views to Ms. West's in a more restrained manner are directing their fears and anger at the wrong targets.

This view was quite neatly expressed last week by blogger Natty Vee:

"When I hear this kind of thing in public, I can’t help but pity the person it comes from. 'They’re coming over here, taking our jobs' is a convenient way of explaining why life's a bit shit to someone who struggles to understand a concept as massive as [the] global economy, which is probably why this view has been grasped by many people with both hands. It's only natural that they will tend towards the thing that’s most easily imaginable to them, that some sort of villain has stopped them from getting what they want. If that villain is the Polish community, or ‘brown people’, so be it. Things like recession, national debt etc. just tend to cloud the simplicity that these people crave."

Recent immigrants to this country are here because it has suited the business community to import cheap, willing labour. Should the immigrants face opprobrium for answering that call? Or should businesses be criticised instead? If either is to face some flak over immigration and tensions arising from it, this is my england would direct that flak towards the latter. Ambition, a propensity to work hard and the drive to improve one's material circumstances are values to which we are all meant to aspire in a capitalist economy. In the majority of cases, immigrants are simply people who embody these values and who, by accident of birth, have started their lives in countries where conditions conspire against the full realisation of the ambitions that any pro-capitalist thinker would encourage in us all. Many London-based readers working in white-collar jobs will doubtless be surrounded in their offices by people who were not born in the capital - ambitious Brits from the provinces who have relocated to where better-paid jobs are most plentiful. It is the view of this is my england that moving to London from Warsaw, Dhaka or Lagos is as unremarkable and as unexceptionable as coming to our capital city from  Bradford, Glasgow or Sunderland. Arrivals from all of these locations are economic migrants. It just happens to be the case that the existence of current and arbitrary nation states, none of which are very old, confers the label 'foreigner' on some groups and not others.

It remains the view of this is my england that Emma West was wrong-headed in her rough analysis of what is ailing a Britain she described as now being "fuck all". The real enemies of a relatively low-paid, probably poorly educated person who feels angry and disenfranchised are not her fellow south London residents who happen to have been born in other countries or who happen not to be white. Her real enemies are the politicians who collude with the banks who ruin the economy and the CEOs running the companies that drive down costs via the importation of inexpensive labour, via the off-shoring of more and more jobs and via the sheltering of their profits from the taxation needed to keep this country a decent place to live.

As Natty Vee says, "this lady isn't everything that's wrong in the world, she's just a product of it. She doesn't know what she's saying, doesn't react to what's being said to her at all. Every statement is learned, copied and  repeated because it makes sense in her imagined version of reality".

From where, though, has Emma West learned those statements, and who would benefit from such statements being widely circulated? Ladies and gentlemen, please be introduced to the predominantly right-wing news media of the United Kingdom. Owned and operated by those who seek to minimise their tax liabilities, maximise their profits and normalise the ideas to which global capital would prefer you to confine your thinking, these newspapers are the sources of the remarks made in anger and confusion by an unfortunate woman on a south London tram. Not least among these is the Daily Mail, whose description of Ms. West's potty-mouthed  outburst as a "vile racist rant" is deliciously ironic given the fearful intolerance of change and difference that is at the core of the 'paper's world-view.

Presuming to speak for Emma

While the other cities listed above were chosen at random as examples of places from which people might move to London, Sunderland was included for a reason. The north-east England city was selected because it is the home town of someone who, when watching Emma West chooses to see not a confused and unhappy person but a paragon of some mythical 'British spirit.'

It's uncertain why Sean Allan, a prolific teenage vlogger from Tyne and Wear, rejoices in the YouTube user name MarmiteMan4. Perhaps the name draws on the widely promoted idea that the sticky, dark brown yeast extract is loved by some and loathed by others. Or perhaps young Sean just really likes Marmite.

At just seventeen years old, Allan has decided that Hitler (whose Mein Kampf he reviews rather favourably) lived well into his seventies and had children, finally passing away surrounded by loving family members in Argentina. Smirking when he says it, the self-described "nationalist" calls this image of the German dictator meeting a peaceful end as a "Zionist's nightmare". For a supposedly dedicated Hitler fanboy, though, young Master Allan has only a loose grasp on the details of the usual account of Adolf's demise. The young Mackem labours under the misapprehension that the history books place Hitler's death as taking place in the Reichstag. Of course, the apparently keen scholar of all things Adolf has confused Germany's parliament building with the altogether less grand hole in the ground in which the Führer took his own life. Let's hope that Sean applies himself more carefully to his college studies. After all, he's going to need solid exam results for the remainder of his time in education. He lives in an area of high unemployment and while he is undoubtedly more than averagely articulate, he may find that his digital footprint causes him some trouble when applying for jobs in the years ahead. Not every employer would feel comfortable having a Hitler apologist on the payroll.

Of course, Master Allan is keen to believe some crackpot account of the defeated dictator escaping to South America because, in his view, reports of Hitler having committed suicide are a "Zionist lie" propagated to smear the young vlogger's hero as a coward because "Jews simply don't like him."

Regarding Emma West, MarmiteMan4 tells us that the south London woman "showed amazing courage" to say "what millions of other people are thinking but will not say".

Here, then, young Allan constructs an argument entirely out of assumptions. He assumes that Ms. West has devised a coherent set of views and that the cause of her sharing them in a public place is her "courage". He also presumes to know what "millions of people are thinking". Always distrust any argument based on a supposed ability to get inside the heads and thoughts of millions of people. It can't be done. If it could, it would count as a magical power. Even surveys such as the one presented by the Guardian back in March  offer only limited insight into people's actual thoughts. Just because a majority of people have found reasons to oppose further immigration does not imply that they have decided to think of immigrants or non-white people as "their enemies", which is what Sean Allan decides to call the various tram passengers to whose presence Ms. West seemed to object. We now understand that the infamous 'My Tram Experience' video shows a woman with a record of poor mental health behaving badly. We understand that we know nothing about whether she has ever consciously constructed an organised set of views about race, immigration or nationality.  We don't know if she just happened to focus on these issues when angry on a tram or if she might have gone  on about something else when feeling unhappy and provoked in all-white company. For Allan, though, this sorry little episode shows "that British people, even surrounded by their enemies, today, will not give up." He feels that ranting incoherently at people travelling on a tram is a demonstration of "British spirit". Well, perhaps. But only that strand of British spirit which we used to see among the worst dregs of the England football team's travelling support or still see among the most ignorant and inebriated fools that this country flies out to the beaches of Spain and Greece.

Sean Allan, then, a young man who lives in one of the least ethnically diverse cities in England presumes to know that the various peoples of London go around thinking of each other as enemies. Sean Allan, a young man who may very well have never knowingly met a Jew in person, sees Zionist conspiracies at the root of much of the world's troubles. On this last point, his thinking seems particularly muddled when he warns young people in America (it's uncertain how many of his viewers are young Americans) against the possible lure of the Occupy movement. Reminding us that "as you know" (more mind-reading presumption there) "the entire financial establishment in America is controlled by one group of people - Zionists; as is the media, as is the Government and basically everything that is completely mainstream in the United States", Allan identifies the Occupy protesters as a mixture of black power groups and Jews. So that's Jews protesting against a Zionist establishment then, Sean? So presumably these are non-Zionist Jews? Jews who, if they're not part of your imagined Zionist conspiracies, are surely just decent people who happen to be Jewish? But if they're just decent people who happen to be Jewish, why would their participation in the Occupy movement be one of the things that makes you warn against it? Anyone would think that you just have an irrational dislike of Jews merely on the basis of ethnicity and faith if you object to even those Jews who are not part of the shadowy "movement" you believe controls everything of influence in America. That would make you a racist, even though you profess to prefer the term 'racialist'.

Sean Allan is not the only racist to have adopted poor, confused Emma West as a symbol of a dubious ideology without her knowledge or approval. He is certainly not the most prominent racist to do so - notwithstanding the million hits received by his video about the tram incident, his is, after all, just a kid in a bedroom outlining his ideas on YouTube.

More well-known than young Sean is Andrew Brons, one of the BNP's two MEPs. Having apparently fallen out with the other one (Nick Griffin), Brons's cause is furthered by a website called BNP Ideas. An article there puts forward the idea that the arrest and imprisonment of Ms. West is evidence of "the creeping Sovietisation of Britain" and that she is a victim of the "British Soviet Gulag".

Another person whose views seem to have a lot in common with the BNP and Andew Brons is Jim Dowson. Writing on the British Resistance website, he urges readers to send Christmas cards and money to "brave" Emma West. "I know things are tight," he writes, "but how can we, as patriots, possibly enjoy our Christmas surrounded by family and friends if we do nothing for Emma and her children, separated by the high priests of multiculturalism and her family sacrificed on the high alter (sic) of political correctness". Those "high priests", presumably, are a few British Transport Police cops based in South London and the magistrates down in Croydon. It seems likely that low-level cogs in the justice machine would be surprised to hear themselves described as high priests of anything. Though perhaps Dowson, like Sean Allan, sees complicated conspiracy everywhere. Perhaps he believes that Ian McNeal and his fellow Croydon magistrates take their orders from some hook-nosed Mr. Big in Tel Aviv or on Wall Street.

Big things made of little things

So here we have a small incident. A woman with a history of mental illness gets herself into a bit of trouble by shouting at some strangers on a suburban tram. We don't know much about her but she immediately becomes held up by some folks as a symbol of what they think of as terrible flaws in British society and by others as some kind of heroine figure for neo-Nazi crackpots. This is an age of hysteria and bullshit. Oh for quieter times.