Johann Hari

Brick Lane is a glorious streak of neon and curry, of clubbers and fundamentalists, of old Jewish immigrant stories and new Muslim ones, in the guts of the East End. It is my home, and over the past week I have been sharing it with a little news story – and with another small sign that free speech in Britain is slowly sandpapered down by reactionary mini-mobs.

It begins with one of the most tender and beautiful British novels I know. Monica Ali’s ‘Brick Lane’ is the almost Victorian story of one woman’s liberation. Nasneen is an eighteen year-old girl shipped over from Bangladesh to London’s Bangla-Town, to marry an obese forty year old she has never met. At first she sees the East End as “a vast dump of people rotting away under a mean strip of sky,” and she is forced to spend her days cutting off her husband’s corns and trimming his nasal hair. She is discouraged from learning English or from ever leaving the house. She has been taught to be limp and passive all her life – “we are women, what can we do?” her mother always asked. She is kept drugged by superstition, told constantly it would be a sin against God to rebel.

But slowly, Nasneen realises “she could not wait for the future to be revealed, but had to make it for herself”. She learns English. She learns to ice-skate. She has an affair with a beautiful young man. She even begins to develop a more liberal strain of Islam, rejecting the dogmatic literalism of the men around her. In the end, she lets her husband pursue the immigrants’ dream-disease – Going Home Syndrome – back to Bangladesh, while she stays here, a free woman in a free country.

When the BBC decided to make this into a film, they naturally wanted to shoot on Brick Lane itself – and the troubles began. A small number of Bengali men were enraged by Ali. A woman – a woman! – had dared to take the rest of us on an intimate tour of the Bengali community. She had even tried, in her subtle, tender way, to incite a rebellion of Muslim women, to encourage them to become Nasneems and discover the joy of being free-thinking sexual women rather than being terrorised into tethered livestock hiding in cloth-prisons. They organised demonstrations to halt the filming, to shut up this uppity bitch once and for all. Their meetings talked of burning the book and of burning her.

This weekend I nipped down to the sweetshop where Abdus Saliqh has been masterminding this campaign. He is a neat man, sitting in front of a pile of newspaper cuttings, with a camera crew waiting to one side. “I have been here 37 years. It was a dark lane when we arrived,” he says. “Through our hard work, we made Brick Lane. The National Front used to come and attack us but we built it up. We are proud to live here.”

I instinctively warm to him as he says this. But when he speaks about Monica Ali, his face contorts. “She has targeted our community to get rich!” he says. “She is saying my father jumped from his ship like a monkey, that we are dirty, we are uncivilised!” I pause in incomprehension. Where in the book does it say this? “She says it! She compares us to monkeys!” One of Ali’s characters compares people from the Syleth region of Bangladesh to monkeys. Then the novel’s most sympathetic character Nasneem rebukes him, pointing out that two of Bangladesh’s great national heroes – Colonel Osmany and Shah Jalal – came from Sylhet. Don’t you see, Saliqh, that a novelist can make a character say something she doesn’t personally believe? Do you think the Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel is a Nazi because he writes dialogue for Nazi characters like “Kill the kike”? He scoffs. “It is the same thing!” he declares, waving his hand.

Salique claims to have read the book, but he keeps referring to events and passages that don’t exist, like a scene where lice fall from a character’s hair into food. But soon we get to the real reason for this rage. “Women are not fucking around in this area,” he says. “Our women, most of them, 99 percent, respect their husbands and respect their tradition.” He shakes with anger at Ali’s challenge to this ‘natural’ order. Ali’s crime has been to challenge the supremacy of Bengali men by articulating the secret experiences of Begali women. I have lived among (and loved) British Asian communities all my life – and I can attest to its veracity. More importantly, British-Bangladeshi women are seeing it for themselves: according to the Brick Lane bookshop, thousands of women hidden behind veils are buying the Bengali language version and reading it in samizdat.

This is not new. Over the past few years, there has been a cascade of protests by ultra-conservatives within Europe’s immigrant communities trying to silence women from their own neighbourhoods who are bravely calling for change. It’s not just Monica Ali. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Bezhti was stopped by a Sikh fundamentalist mob. Fadela Amara receives constant threats for setting up the Muslim feminist organisation ‘Neither Whores Nor Doormats’. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is living under armed guard because she dared to make a film exposing the epidemic of domestic violence thumping Muslim women in the Netherlands. (The director was decapitated).

The logic of multiculturalism has made it hard for these thugs to be challenged. Multiculturalism treats immigrant communities as homogenous blocks, represented by elderly, reactionary “community spokesmen”. It has created the bizarre situation where the often-great feminist Germaine Greer has ended up siding with the patriarchal protestors as the keepers of authentic Bengali culture against the carping feminists. Yet in reality, immigrant communities are diverse, clashing cacophonies like everyone else. As the great Amarya Sen has been arguing, we should ditch the outdated idea of multiculturalism and support the progressive wings of all and any communities.

All along Brick Lane I find people who view Saliqh and his tiny band of protestors as an embarrasment. Jamal Abdul Quayam, co-owner of Taj Stores, the oldest Bengali shop on Brick Lane, calls him “a big-mouth who wants publicity,” adding, “It is uneducated people like this who stop the progress of our community.” Amzal Hussain, whose restaurant is only a few doors from Saliqh’s shop, says, “I believe in free speech. It is why I love this country, and why many Bengalis do. I would be very happy for the film to be made in my restaurant.”

But this sane Bengali majority has been ignored. The filming on Brick Lane has been stopped. Salique brags about his victory. This is only a small infringement – the film will be made elsewhere – but the pattern is yet again affirmed. Instead of holding open the institutions of a free society to support these women as they change their communities, we are allowing reactionaries to intimidate them with threats of force. Bezhti is now unstageable. Hirsi Ali has been driven from Europe.

In London, the police have begun to defend free speech only selectively, telling people under threat from foaming fundamentalist fringes that they “cannot guarantee their security”. When a Muslim man held up the Mohammed cartoons at a Free Speech rally in London earlier this year to demonstrate his support for free speech, he was actually arrested for a “public order disturbance”. When my friends at the Liberal magazine printed the cartoons, they were told by the police they were on their own. What right have the police to decide to abandon chunks of the population to fanatics? Why did they not guarantee the safe passage of camera crews on Brick Lane?

The Battle of Brick Lane has been another small deflating pin-prick for our free speech – and for some of the bravest women in Britain.

A low, weeping stream of black and Asian women has washing into London’s hospitals over the pasty decade in a new, taboo public health crisis. Their skin is pocked, burned or even atrophying from their face – and all because they bleached it in an attempt to look white. Across this city, I have noticed innocuous tubs of ‘skin lightening cream’ have been appearing behind the counters of newsagents and chemists. They promise black and Asian women they can fade from black to white without pain or shame.

The most obvious question is – why? Why do so hundreds of thousands of black and Asian Londoners see their skin colour as a blemish to be scrubbed away? It was hard to track down any black women who admitted to whiting up – none of my friends would confess – but hiding in cyberspace several women were more candid. Even there, no-one called the process bleaching. It was always “evening out” their skin tone. They offered a jumble of visceral explanations: “I just feel better”, “I feel more confident”, “I get more men checking me out.”

Some suggested it was no more odd than white women slapping on fake tan. But a white girl who lies on a beach for a fortnight is buying into the symbolism of being rich, of having time to laze around getting sun-kissed. A black girl who slathers on bleaching products is doing something very different. She is buying into the symbolism of being white. Surely she is subtly accepting the racism around her and washing it onto her own skin? Khany Dhlomo-Mkhize, editor of True Love magazine for black women, thinks so. She says, “It is part of making yourself less black, ripping away at your roots. It is the residual effects of the past, when black was seen as unworthy.”

The most dangerous prejudices are always the ones internalised by the victims – the inner Scarlett O’Hara – and this new black women’s burden has distant historical roots that still haunt Londoners. During the African slave trade, the light-skinned were house-slaves; the ‘darkies’ were worth less and worked in the fields. In India, the rulers for centuries, from the Aryans to the British, were white and rewarded their lighter subjects. Today, a study in the US discovered that light-skinned black women have far higher incomes. Long after these oppressions have died, their assumptions hang in the air, like stale smoke. It’s why – from Hollywood to Bollywood, and on every cat-walk inbetween – black is beautiful only when it is nearly-white. It’s no coincidence that whiter-than-black Halle Berry was the first ‘black’ woman to win a Best Actress Oscar.

In their slavish attempt to adapt to slave-era styles, these London women are doing terrible harm to their bodies. The most dangerous ingredient in standard skin-bleachers is hydroquinine, a substance used in developing photographs. The list of side-effects it can cause is long: burns, diabetes, hypertension, acne, hyper-hairiness and skin cancer. It is supposed to be banned in this country, but on Brixton Market I could find products containing it on sale openly, with sweet names like ‘Lady Diana Cream’, illustrated by our late, great Queen of Hearts. Southwark Council regularly carries out raids that have uncovered more than fifty brands of skin-bleach. Customs and Excise regularly intercept crates of this poison. One leading medical journal recently warned that the use of these creams is “a potential time bomb.”

When the government of Sierra Leone was overwhelmed with bleach-victims, they launched an advertising campaign with a slogan some people thought had won out in the seventies: “Black is beautiful. Keep your colour.” It’s tempting to say we need a similar campaign in London, but any trickle of government money will be immediately washed away by the fashion industry’s constant river of effluent. These neuroses are not natural. They are stoked and stirred, for profit, by fashionistas. The psychiatrist Anne Becker tracked the changes in Fiji – a country where women were considered beautiful if they had a big, fat body – after Western media was introduced in 1995. Within three years, a third of teenage girls had developed eating disorders, and all longed to be Moss-sticks.

Does anybody really expect the fashion industry to start lifting the trashed self-esteem of black and Asian women, when it makes its money promoting a body image of white women who are literally sick, too malformed and misshapen to menstruate? No – the bleaching time-bomb will tick on, with more Londoners burned because they are afraid of the dark in their own skin.

I am grieving. Tonight, on More4, the Bartlett years draw to an end, and big fat salty tears will run down my oversized cheeks. No more fast-talking from beautiful people in White House corridors. No more stirring speeches from the American President about the need to end global warming. No more CJ Cregg – the only woman on earth I would sleep with, just out of respect. The West Wing is closing its doors after eight seasons of bliss.

One of the most depressing experiences of the past six years has been getting to the end of an episode of the West Wing, stirred by President Bartlett’s attacks on Christian fundamentalists and defence of the poor, only to switch over to CNN and realise George Bush is still living in the real Oval Office. Oh sure, West Wing had big problems. There was the ill-fated fifth season – remember Zoe Bartlett being kidnapped? There was the blatant propaganda, lulling Americans into thinking their democracy still functions properly – “oh, we couldn’t possibly do favours for our campaign donors…” they would all insist with a straight face. And there’s the horrific episode where Bartlett (a liberal!) decides to bomb the hell out of the Middle East because one American citizen – one – has been killed there.

But West Wing was an oasis of intelligent television amidst the endless cop shows and crap shows. So long, Mr President. I’ll miss you.

The first thing to melt in London's globally warmed summer is the fragile etiquette of life on the tube. At the risk of sounding like Lynn Truss, what has happened to the convention that you wait until the other passengers have got off before you barge onto the carriage yourself? Who are these neurotic freaks - they are almost always expensively-dressed City people - who barge their way onto the carriage as if the rest of us were a slightly unsightly obstacle to their world? Repeat after me: You. Will. Still. Get. Onto. The. Train. If. You. Wait. And pretty soon, you will be getting off the tube yourself - don't you see that the convention protects you too, fool?

You have to give credit where it's due: George W Bush has crafted a beautiful response to the 60th anniversary of the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that falls next week. He has chosen this as the moment to drive (yet another) asbestos stake through the heart of the world's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to lend his approval to a century of nuclear stand-offs across the globe. Don't be mean-spirited - you have to admire his Bill Hicks-style genius for comic timing.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (may it rest in peace) is pretty basic. It was written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when pale and shaken world leaders were slowly realising how close they had come to committing "rational suicide" by launching a nuclear war. A consensus emerged that the number of nuclear weapons in the world needed to be drastically reduced, and that no new nuclear powers should be allowed to emerge to increase the risk even further. Almost every country in the world signed. The non-nuclear countries agreed not to tool up, in exchange for the already-nuclear countries agreeing to slowly dismantle their arsenals and to never, under any circumstances, share their nuclear technologies.

The Treaty has been in intensive care for years. Since it was signed in 1968, at least six other countries have acquired nukes, and only one country (South Africa) has disarmed. During Bush junior's presidency, the US has ramped up its arsenal of WMD, working on "mini-nukes" and "more useable" bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The North Korean tyranny has spent billions on nuclear weapons while its people starve and the Iranian mullahs are inching close behind. The recent UN meeting to discuss the future of the Treaty was a shambles, since it was plain that nobody intended to abide by its terms.

And then this week, George Bush unplugged the life support and held a pillow over the patient's face. After fêting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House, Bush unilaterally ended the sanctions imposed against India since it went nuclear in 1998, and privately welcomed her role as an nuclear bulwark against China. He announced a deal to begin sharing US nuclear technology with India, making a mockery of one of the key ideas of the Treaty.

It would be more honest to give the Treaty a public burial and admit that, for now, we are living in a world where nukes are proliferating across the globe with no international restraints. This might just jolt us awake. But should it? Is there really any danger of a nuclear weapon actually being used this century? Sadly, you can only dismiss nuclear weapons as 1980s nightmares if you are very short-sighted or if you have a very bad memory.

Let's look at the sub-continent Bush has just begun to share his nuclear technologies with. Twice in the past six years, India and Pakistan have stood at the brink of nuclear war. In the 1999 Kargil crisis, the countries exchanged nuclear threats 13 times - with no hot-line between the two leaders to calm them down. Just three summers ago, Britain advised her citizens to evacuate cities like Delhi and Karachi because there was a "real and imminent" risk of them being evaporated in a mushroom cloud. The Foreign Office's judgement call was right: the Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes was bragging: "India can take a nuclear hit and hit back," while Pakistan's General Mirza Aslam Beg announced: "We can make a first strike, a second strike and even a third. Look - you can die crossing the street, or you can die in a nuclear war. You've got to die some day anyway."

We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs.China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many - and the risk is doubled each time.

True, since the election of the Congress Party last year, India's relations with Pakistan have (very slightly) relaxed. But the construction of a nuclear bunker underneath the Prime Minister's office has continued, and nobody has forgotten that the two countries have been at war four times in the past 60 years. The bombs have now fused with the fierce nationalism of the countries, with some Indian leaders still talking proudly of the "Hindu bomb" - presumably followed by Hindu fall-out and Hindu radioactive poisoning. (There is a horrible irony in this, since Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the bomb - responded to seeing the first ever nuclear explosion by quoting the god Vishnu from Hindu scripture: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.")

It is wildly naïve to think that all these stand-offs between highly volatile countries can continue until - when? forever? - without, sooner or later, a bomb being used. Even the minimal protections of the Cold War - like hotlines between leaders - are not yet in place in most of these countries. How many reruns of the Cuban Missile Crisis should we risk over the next century?

It is not only the Usual Suspects who are warning about this. Even Margaret Thatcher - one of the most militant defenders of nuclear weapons in the world - has predicted that a "battlefield nuclear weapon will be used in the next 20 years".

So where are all the old luvvies-for-CND, now the issue has become more complex, more "foreign" and less sexy? At the height of the last India-Pakistan stand-off, I asked Martin Amis what he thought about nuclear weapons now, and he mumbled something about a "regional nuclear war" being "less frightening". This is based on a dumb and flawed premise. All nuclear bombs in existence today are 20 times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan, and there are currently over 9,000 of them ready to fire within 45 minutes. The danger of any of these being used against Britain is virtually nil. But if just a handful of these weapons is exploded anywhere, there will be disastrous ecological and economic consequences everywhere - including here. They will not be confined to the region where they are detonated. It is not clear how many weapons have to be exploded to trigger a nuclear winter and On the Beach-style universal death, but some scientists believe the use of India and Pakistan's joint arsenals would be sufficient.

These are ludicrous risks when there is a solution out there - even if it is pretty retro. One day we will have to disinter the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, wipe off the soil Bush just tossed on to its coffin, and try to start a process of gradual, multilateral disarmament, removing a major threat to human life one radioactive step at a time. But do we have to wait for Hiroshima Redux to actually happen before we start on this long, slow work?

This week, politicians gathered in a city at the heart of the developed world and took decisions that will result in mass death. Asked to name this place and this decision, most of us would think instinctively of the trashed cities of Lebanon, bombed on orders from Tel Aviv. A few would think of the on-going genocide in Darfur, planned and directed from Khartoum. But sober studies by Nobel-prize winning economists have shown that the world’s most deadly city this week was Geneva, a civilised town of smart suits, gushing fountains and an unhealthy number of Smurfs in every shop window. (Don’t ask me why).

The world’s politicians, gathered at the World Trade Organisation here in Switzerland, have finally cremated the “development round” promised to the world’s poorest people five years ago. (Or, to give it its full title, “this trade thingy” – copyright T. Blair 2006). In the weeks following the massacre in New York, the World Trade Organisation gathered not far from Ground Zero and pledged that this time, the global trade talks were going to work differently. Now they were going to put the needs of the world’s poorest people – the two billion human beings who live on less than a dollar a day – first. Insane ideologies would be defeated, they said, not just by war but with economic opportunity.

The leaders of the poorest countries dared to hope. For every pound the rich world gives to poor people in aid, it causes seven pounds of damage through unfair trade rules. Think of a woman breeding chickens for sale in Ghana. When she gets to her local market, she discovers that she is competing against frozen chickens grown, fed and shipped in from the rich world. These chickens are being flogged off far below the market price, because rich governments paid their farmers fat subsidies to breed and feed the birds and fly them here. She cannot compete. Her little business goes bust before it even begins. And it gets worse. She cannot go and work for (say) a chicken factory or a field growing wheat to sell back to us, because we erect massive tariff walls to keep them out. We turn a potential bread-basket into a dust bowl.

It’s not hard to see how Doha could have delivered for her. These agricultural subsidies have very little support back home, and would be easy to erode: the poverty-stricken recipients currently include Chevron, Texaco, Elizabeth Windsor and the Duke of Marlborough. For a few flickering moments, it seemed like the Doha round would eliminate some of this. The Make Poverty History movement rose across the developed world to force our politicians to act. But Doha swiftly morphed into something contrary to its original remit. By the end it was offering a package so unfair that aid agencies like Oxfam were saying it would actually do harm to the poor if it was passed. Due to poor-world horror and rich-world intransigence, Doha’s life support finally stuttered to a halt in the clear Swiss air this week.

So what went wrong? The problem seems to have resided partly in the ideology of the WTO itself. There are three broad-brush ways to organise world trade. The first is free trade. This is where all countries – rich and poor – abolish their tariff walls and their subsidies, and exchange goods as equals on the free market. An Algerian can sell his goods to an Alabaman or Albanian without hitting any tariffs, and vice versa.

The second is fair trade. This is where the rich world abolishes its tariffs and subsidies, but the poor are allowed to keep some. It means the Ghanaian chicken farmer would be able to sell to us, but a chicken farmer from Surrey would have to pay a fat fee to sell anything back to her. This is based on a moral as well as an economic basis: a starving African has a great need for development than a person in Surrey. Every country that has ever climbed the Everest of growth to become rich has protected its indigenous markets in this way until they were robust enough to face international competition. For example, the US had average industrial tariffs of 40 percent between the 1820 and 1945 – far higher than anything Africa is asking for today.

The third system – the one that mostly prevails at the moment – should be dubbed rich-world protectionism. This is where the rich swaddle themselves in expensive subsidies and tariffs but the poor are rarely allowed to. Every major economic study shows this approach starves the Ghanaian chicken farmer, the West African cotton farmer and millions more.

The WTO was designed to move the world towards free trade – but the problem is that this philosophy sees fair trade and rich-world protectionism as equally evil. To them, protection for a Ghanaian farmer is as bad as protection for Elizabeth Windsor. At every stage of the Doha negotiations, every time the rich world grudgingly agreed to a cut in its tariffs and subsidies, the poor world had to agree a cut in its own paltry equivalent. Okay, so the US and EU will ditch export subsidies, which make up 3 percent of our agricultural budget? Right, then India and Brazil need to crowbar open their economies to our goods – and allow hundreds of thousands of their farmers to be plunged into unemployment. One rich world negotiator summarised this attitude clearly: “There needs to be blood on the floor from everyone.” But the problem is that the rich world blood consisted of fewer subsidies to Chevron and Texaco, who can take it. The poor world blood consisted of starving kids, who can’t. A real ‘development round’ would have acknowledged the different starting points of the WTO members, and recognised that it defeats the whole purpose if the poor have to make the same sacrifices as the rich.

And yet I cannot join the gloating on the grave of Doha staged by some. The effect of its death will not be the creation of a fair trade system next week. As one Oxfam spokesman explained, “It means all of the injustices in world trade that we have now are going to stay indefinitely. It means the US and the EU will continue to subsidise and dump their products on world markets, and means farmers in poor countries will stay poor.” And die in their millions of the predictable, preventable diseases of poverty I saw scarring Central Africa recently, like malaria.

Gnarled conservatives will use this as another reason to declare that Make Poverty History was a naïve delusion, just “kids screaming in the mud.” But the anti-slavery movement did not give up with one defeat, nor a hundred. From the rubble of Doha, we have no choice but to see an opportunity to start building the case for a fair trade alternative to a blinkered WTO not fit for purpose. The one billion people going to bed hungry tonight because they are locked out of the global economy don’t have time for despair.

To find out what you can do, go to www.maketradefair.com

You can send comments on this for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk

You can send comments just for me to johann -*at*- johannhari.com