Whitehaven

According to the media, something very American has happened in Britain this week -- a shooting spree, as American as streaky bacon, apple pie, and Jell-o. In these times of extreme grief, outrage, fear and uncomprehension, the media draws on what is familiar: gun violence = USA, Hungerford, Dunblane, and a call for tighter gun laws. The only problem is, in this case, the old formula doesn't quite compute. America is the gun crime capital of the world because our society is awash with easy-to-obtain firearms, many of them specifically made to mow down large numbers of people in small amounts of time. Often, when someone goes postal (a term we invented, thank you very much), our lax gun control laws are to blame because it turns out that he shouldn't have been carrying a gun in the first place and certainly shouldn't have been carrying the types of hand guns and semi-automatics that he used in his crime.

The Cumbria massacre was carried out by a middle-aged man with no history of mental problems or criminality using a shotgun and a .22 calibre rifle. See the difference?

Despite being from the land of of the quick and the dead, I don't have a strong stance on guns. I have shot them, enjoyed doing so, but would not shed a tear of they were all made illegal tomorrow. I would be happy to see more gun control in my own country, but my deepest fear regarding guns -- something that has been with me since seeing 'Bowling For Columbine' -- is that guns are not the problem. In that movie, the director Michael Moore points out that, per capita, Canadians own as many guns as American, yet they aren't shooting each other apart a couple times a year. On the other extreme, Britain has some of the tightest gun control laws in the world, but they weren't able to stop Cumbria. I have always respected Britain's ability and wilingness to learn from its mistakes and evolve as a society. However, I fear that the Cumbria shootings prove that there are some bogeymen that cannot be banished by public outrage and swift legislation alone. Such dark thoughts bring a whole new meaning to the term "Broken Britain".

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As Ted rightly points out, underneath the shock, horror and sympathy, the most pressing - and uncomfortable - question nagging away at the British consciousness right now is 'why?'. Even before Bird had fired his final, dreadful shot, the race was on to find a motive - and as the grim realisation that we may never find one dawns on the nation, there is a sense of unease which is impossible to shake. This isn't supposed to happen here: even now, despite the painful events of last week, the British perspective is that this is an American problem.

The reason for this collective national amnesia is that the alternative is too awful to consider - the only way we can sleep peacefully in our beds is to treat this as an anomaly. Without wishing to rationalise the clearly insane, the most notorious American shootings tend to be based on some sort of twisted logic, from the revenge-seeking outcasts of Columbine to the publicity-grabbing farewell videos of Virginia Tech. There is even some comfort to be found in the pantomime posing and videogame weaponry of US atrocities, which at least give society a recognisable framework for their anger - there is no shred of reassurance to be found in an apparently well-liked man waging his own lonely war across one of Britain's most scenic counties. Dwell on this too long, and suddenly every familar face from the pub is a potential killer. Far easier to forget until the next one comes along.

It is interesting to note how Whitehaven fits into the overall debate on guns in the US and the UK. When an evidently troubled individual's uncontrolled urges combine with a readily availabile arsenal of gruesome weaponry to deadly effect - as is often the case in US tragedies - we in the UK are quick to preach that this is an inevitable result of your lenient gun laws. The counter from the pro-arms lobby, however, is that it isn't the guns themselves that actually commit the crime - an argument all-the-more compelling, and unsettling, when the trigger is as elusive as it is in Whitehaven, as it was in Dunblane, and as it was in the sleepy village of Hungerford in 1987.

Immigration

It's a bad time to be an immigrant, or someone who "looks like" an immigrant. You can't even say the word between California and Croatia without making people nervous. Immigration. A few weeks ago, in a move that sounded strangely familiar, the state of Arizona passed a law dictating that immigrants carry their documents with them at all times. And how will the authorities know they are carrying their documents? Simple: they can demand to see the papers of anyone of whom there is a "reasonable suspicion" of illegality.

Many brits will hear in this law the echos of their own Terrorism Act 2000, section 44 to be precise, which allows the police to stop and search anyone who looks "suspicious." The problem here is what constitutes "suspicious." Personally, I'm suspicious of all white people because they have been and continue to be the perpatrators of the biggest crimes in human history. However, when governments start talking about "suspicious", they are invariably referring to people of my skin tone and hair color, or darker -- immigrant looking people. Of course, racial profiling is illegal, so politicians are making up all kinds of ingenious ways in which to identify a suspicious person. Congressman Brian Bilbray suggesting paying close attention to "the kind of dress you wear". You can see why these white people make me suspicious.

Minorities, racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise, are easy scapegoats in times of crisis. When things begin to go pear-shaped in a country, the first to the chopping block are the ones with funny accents, darker skin, different histories, their own ways of doing things, and Jewish people, who have often embodied all of these things. In the United States, our current whipping boys are Latin Americans, predominantly from Central America and Mexico. In Britain, it is Indians, Pakistanis, Carribbeans and Eastern Europeans. In France it's North Africans. Every wealthy country in the world has its class of undersirable and maybe even subversive, but most definitely 'suspicious', people who they whip mercilessly until the their constituents, bloodlust satisfied, go to sleep at night and dream of a world that has never hear the word "globalisation".

Being "anti-immgrant" is one of the general idealogical banners that the American Right is rallying around because it simultaneously scapegoats a lot of much broader problems while also letting Republican commentators take underhanded digs at President Obama. Bear in mind that many in the Tea Party Movement still doubt Obama's citizenship. And so the fear is amplified exponentially -- not only are immgrants overflowing our borders to steal our jobs and rape our daughters and degrade our way of life, but they have installed another darky in the White House to turn a blind eye to all of it! Mary -- get me my gun.

The words are made up but the sentiments among a certain group of white, working class, traditional-valued, bigoted Americans and the fearmongers who pander to them are very real. Just like the BNP is very real, just like the Swiss People's Party is very real. Now it could be that British culture, cultivated by hundreds of years of homogeneity IS lost and cheapened by immigration, and therefore needs some sort of protection (Tim: I would like to hear your views on this), but my country was built by immigrants, and it is absurd to think that they are simply going to stop coming if we put a couple of laws into place. A law like the one in Arizona does nothing besides legitimize bigotry by the police, which, if you've been keeping track, is not an organization that historically needs excuses to be bigoted.

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Well, first of all, there's an easy answer to your query, Ted: immigrants built your country; invading hordes built ours. That Great British Culture the nationalists love to bleat on about - is it Roman? Viking? Celtic? French? Perhaps - and those of a hard right persuasion might need to look away here - it's a multinational blend of all of them, and that's precisely what makes it so 'great' in the first place. After all, our patron saint St George was Turkish, the Queen's half-German and our much-loved national dish is the defiantly untraditional Chicken Tikka Masala - it's not entirely clear what, exactly, our flag-worshipping friends are trying to protect.

What is clear, and Ted already touched on this, is the deeply unpleasant role of racism in all this. Wave-upon-wave of our beloved European conquerers have found themselves quite comfortably accomodated into the myth of an 'indiginous Britain' - it is only when burkas and turbans grace the high street that the hard right really raises it's ugly, shaven head. We've had our tensions with Eastern European migrants, sure - but they are treated more as unwelcome neighbours than the malicious gypsy status reserved for our darker-skinned cousins. It is little surprise that our 'Stop and Search' statistics make for depressing reading; even less of a shock, sadly, that our incoming government has just made it even easier for the police to act on discriminatory sentiment rather than pesky old 'human rights'.

So yes, immigration is hotly, if rarely intelligently, debated on this side of the Atlantic as much as it is on yours. Fear is a powerful weapon, particularly in a recession when jobs are scarce - and as Gordon Brown's infamous encounter with Mrs Duffy revealed, someone different is always the easiest target when communities feel under threat. In my view, this is where good governance should come to the fore: it's their job to protect basic human rights and explain to xenophobes that they are plain wrong. Unfortunately, we choose to make concessions to the racists instead, letting prejudice creep into everyday policing and eroding some of our clearest civil liberties. Last time Stop and Search was enforced in Britain, it led to riots on the streets. If history has taught us one thing, it's that it's clearly no way to keep the peace.

UK Election Special: The Results

So...you were so liberal you decided not to vote for stodgy old Labour and instead put in a vote for the fresh faced Lib Dems? Oops, you've just elected the Conservatives. Welcome to Hell, you granola-crunching, organic, free-range, bio-diesel swilling piece of biodegradable yuppie trash. This whole thing is giving me bad Bush v Gore 2000predecessor, squared off against a middle-of-the-road conservative, and just enough lefties defected to the third party (an owl-faced man named Ralph Nadir who represented the Green Party) as a matter of principle to give the conservative the win. If you have read a newspaper in the last ten years, you can see that those idealistic liberals really proved a point, just not the one they were hoping for.

Unlike what you may have learned when you were twelve, the point of voting isn't to win, it's not to lose. No candidate is going to be everything you want in a politician. In order to get elected, he or she has to represent, or seem to represent, a lot of different people, including, and this one is above all, themselves. This means that our job as voters is to choose the best of a pretty raunchy bunch of characters, whether they are named Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Bush, Gore or Obama. Of course, you can complain, but bear in mind that some groups of voters, like American blacks, had to spend about two hundred years in the land of the free before they got their 'first black president', which, ironically, was what Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton. I suppose, then, that the real lesson to be learned from elections on both sides of the pond is that, unless a third party could actually run away with the election, voting for them is just going to hurt your cause. flashbacks. As you may or may not recall, Al Gore, a slightly 'boring' candidate widely considered to be more of a supporting actor to a much more popular and charismatic, but wildly untrustworthy,

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As alliances go, it's about as unholy as caviar and ketchup. At each other's throats two weeks ago, backslapping their way into Number 10 today: whatever the fallout in the future, Britain's newest comedy duo have, for now at least, completely reconfigured the political landscape of our country. Liberal Democrats are supposed to be dwell in the tree-hugging realms of the left. Conservatives stack their chips in the gated communities on the right. Now the stockbroker and the hippy have joined hands and frolicked into power together, with Jeeves and Wooster gleefully at the helm. Who knew?

On closer analysis, it shouldn't really be the surprise that it is. Grassroots Liberal Democrats may be up in arms - and the steady flow of supporters defecting to Labour suggests trouble ahead - but, as we've discussed before, behind the headline-grabbing single-issue policies, the manifestos of both parties are dominated by a shared distrust of big government; their central philosophies are, in fact, perhaps the closest in parliament. However, what interests me more is the personal side. Why was Clegg, an expensively-educated child of privilege, far happier to go into an alliance with David Cameron, an, er, expensively-educated child of privilege, than he was with Brown, the clunking Scottish social democrat?

Forgive my cycnicism - but what this smacks of to me is that peculiarly British quality of 'being clubbable'. Cameron and Clegg ooze charm. Watching them together is a lesson in the smooth social confidence afforded by an expensive education in the UK - and in many ways, this is the grease that runs the country. We may not have lords and ladies any more, but the upper reaches of British society - be it judges, doctors or politicians - are still dominated by children of privelege, and it is in this very world that our new joint-leaders were born to thrive. It's one big club, and both Cameron and Clegg are perfectly schooled in shaking the right hands, playing by the rules and tipping the doorman on the way out. You can picture them discussing cricket, wine and their long-established ancestral roots; Brown, meanwhile, loved football, porridge and the finer points of Keynesian economics. He never stood a chance; he didn't have any 'chat'. There may have their differences, but when it came to the crunch, Clegg went with what he knew: family, class and the old school tie.