Rising East Online

Editor’s Letter

Immigration And All That

Borat: Who’s Laughing Now?

‘These Romanians and Bulgarians, they come over here, stealing our jobs…’

Who said that? The speaker’s cropped hair, pasty face and bad skin ought to be enough clues. Can you guess?

No, it wasn’t a white working class youth born and bred in Barking, but a Polish plumber boarding the bus to Stansted on his way home for Christmas.

No, that’s not true either: I stole the line from a TV comedy show, then added local embellishments. But in this little fiction there are plenty of interlocking truths: that the last in are often resented most by the last but one, or by the least privileged among local populations; that large-scale immigration from EU accession states has been something of a success story, despite (because?) occurring beyond the ken of British authorities; that the new mode of mobility from East to West Europe may be closer to commuting than the settler models of immigration from Europe to USA or South Asia to Europe; that in the UK the elite response to the influx of white workers from East Europe is interwoven with fear and loathing of the indigenous white working class.

In this short letter there is no room to address all these facets, though I would be pleased if readers were prompted to write on such issues (and more) for future editions of Rising East. Leaving aside these complexities, however, there is one direct contrast which I would like to draw attention to, between on the one hand the mobility of East European immigrants and on the other hand the apparent stasis among sections of the local population of East London.

We would not be talking about the Polish plumber, real or imaginary, if not for his get-up-and-come-here. Another character, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, also has a lot go-ing for him (I recognise that fictional Borat’s real homeland, Kazakhstan, is more West Asia than East Europe, but it is as a Caucasian Easterner that he figures in Western popular consciousness). Though his absurd ambitions are as inflated as his vision of Pamela Anderson, Borat’s readiness to climb onto any available means of transport in order to get on with life, would have made Norman Tebbit proud – except this man ‘on yer bike’ is not the British Northerner that Tebbit had in mind.

Meanwhile local Brits are reported to have become a nation of stop-at-homes. Responding to newspaper accounts of his comments to a conference organised by the Commission for Racial Equality, Newham’s mayor Sir Robin Wales denied describing East Enders as too idle to benefit from construction jobs on the Olympic site – unlike incoming East Europeans. But as part of his speech to another conference, I have heard him invoke the Olympics as the means to a new spirit of Newham; and why would a new spirit be called into being if some Newham residents were not currently seen as spiritless and lacking the get-up-and-go associated with Polish plumbers and even Borat?

Time was when those in authority feared the restlessness of London’s urban poor; now it is listlessness which they seek to address; and the new image of the listless Londoner (as recently as the 1980s the butt was still the mobility and vulgarity of Loadsamoney and Essex Man) stands in stark contrast to that of the lively, hard-working Easterner. Borat is a brilliant joke which points to the tragi-comic condition of Western countries in the early twenty-first century, in which the absurdity of his immigrant ambitions are readily recognisable, but credible goals for domestic consumption are much harder to identify.

Will this vacuum be filled by the Olympics, as Sir Robin hopes? Will the 2012 deadline have a galvanising effect on government, as London mayor Ken Livingstone claims? Or perhaps it is impossible to conjure spirits to a deadline? Can you indeed create new spirit by recognising loss of the old and signing a contract to deliver a mega-media-event?

Watch this space

cSPACE, which uses arts and media to support local communities and young people in voicing their hopes and fears of regeneration, is directed by visual artist Loraine Leeson. For three decades she has worked in socially engaged art, and the span of this work, incorporating art for women’s health in the late 1970s and the Docklands Community Poster Project in the 1980s, is represented in a retrospective show Art for Change running until 20th January 2007 (Open Weds to Saturday 1-6pm) at Space Studios, 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH. The exhibition culminates on 19th January in Total Regeneration, a day of discussion and debate involving participatory art practitioners across Europe. Details and bookings (essential): totalregeneration@spacestudios.org.uk

Loraine Leeson and her art for change will be featured in the spring edition of Rising East. Theme: Creative London. Please send ideas, images, video, audio, written articles or any combination of these, to a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk.

Yours,

Andrew Calcutt

Editor, www.risingeast.org

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