Try something new today (title sponsored by Sainsbury’s)

Drum roll… today is the penultimate day of British Cheese Week. You can’t say you don’t get anything from this blog. How can it have escaped international recognition when it gives you information like this??

For all you cynics out there who think I may be banging on about cheese too much at the moment, I hear you. But fear not. I am not trying to ram it down your throats. I am just offering you a gentle nudge towards this delicious and incredibly sexy food stuff.

This weekend, don’t just stick with your old favourite. That one will always be there, and it won’t get jealous no matter how many other cheeses you try.  So why not give goat’s cheese a chance? Or even sheep’s cheese? ‘Because it sounds terrible,’ most people tell me.

I think it’s sad that so many of us have dismissed these as ‘not my type’. We think they’re from a dodgy background, so we tend to give them a wide berth. But this is just ignorance. Cheeses raised in this way are often amongst the brightest and best cheeses in the country, and will even go on to attract high-profile international recognition.

And now for something completely different… Tonight is Monty Python night on BBC2. Starts 9:15. Rejoice!!

Fanatical about Fromage

Have a look at my latest article in which I come clean about my cheese obsession, and preview the upcoming Great British Cheese Festival at Cardiff Castle.

Follow the link to the full text version, or click on the picture of the article.

More musings from fromage fan will be available next week, as the sheer excitement becomes too much to bear. For next week, dear readers, is an Important Week. It is none other than British Cheese Week.

Meanwhile, get down to Cardiff this weekend for the festival. Do it. You’re gonna love it.

Cheese, Glorious Cheese

Two wonderful things coming up next weekend, The Great British Cheese Festival in Cardiff, and a new article by Nick Bishop. Watch this space.

I have a confession to make: I am literally quite obsessed by cheese. Find out why fromage is so fantastic, and why you may soon discover that the humble cheese is one of life’s greatest treasures.

Check out the Western Mail on Saturday. More details soon.

The Testimony Project

For those of you who were inspired by Refugee Week last month, have a look at this. In fact, even if you missed it completely, I urge you to take a look at the website of The Testimony Project. It may change your perspective on refugees. And if you’re an asylum seeker or a refugee, it could help you a great deal.

Run by top legal experts, volunteers and refugee women,  The Testimony Project highlights the scandalous betrayal of women who are seeking sanctuary. One of its main functions is to offer support and advice to asylum seekers in need, offering a space for them to communicate and make their voices heard.

Supporters of the project include the journalist Jon Snow, the novelist Monica Ali and the respected barrister Helena Kennedy QC.

The video testimonies are especially powerful. Some asylum seekers have been left in limbo for five years, some even more than that, as they wait for a decision on their case. Many have been beaten, tortured or raped. Once in the UK, they are denied access to jobs, education, healthcare and often any benefits too, until a decision is finally made.

Farhat Khan is a female refugee involved in the The Testimony Project. She was regularly beaten by her husband and unable to gain support of her family or the authorities. Her husband threatened to kill her if she mentioned the possibility of divorce.

She was invited to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street in recognition of her charity work and her contribution to the UK government. After all, she had campaigned for other asylum seekers, and had worked for the Department for International Development for Pakistan. She met then then Prime Minister Tony Blair shortly after her second refusal came through.

Mrs Khan’s case was correctly identified by certain sections of the media as evidence of Britain’s “two-faced approach” to asylum. On the one hand, one section of the government were trying to welcome Mrs Khan and applaud her efforts. But this was all fairly hollow, since at the time, her application was refused; another section of the government was trying to keep her out.

Mrs Khan’s case took seven long years to be resolved. Right from the start, she faced the possibility of deportation and uncertainty over her status.  “I was so afraid and so uncertain about the future”, she says. But things progressed slowly as she was left “at the bottom of the pile”.

Most asylum seekers do not have the luxury of positive media attention that Mrs Khan received. Many more are left alone. Unheard. So have a look at the website, and hear their voices for yourself.

Look Beyond the Label and World Refugee Day 2009: is there declining support for the most vulnerable?

Today is World Refugee Day 2009, and for the first time, you can see a live video webcast of life in a refugee camp, featuring interviews with refugees. It’s streaming until 2am tonight on RefugeeDayLive.org. (To turn off the annoying sound of the instant messenger on the right of the screen, press the volume icon directly underneath.)

There’s barely a whisper about World Refugee Day from the UK newspapers or magazine websites. Hats off to The Guardian, though, for their fantastic coverage on refugees, both during refugee week and throughout the year. (See also their Immigration section)

I wanted to focus on some fascinating videos from Look Beyond The Label. You probably think I’m banging on about this a lot this weekend. But it’s a great campaign, and opens eyes to many important issues surrounding refugees.

Mark South works for the Red Cross, the organisation behind LBTL. He told me about the aims of the campaign. He says there are currently “a lot of misconceptions associated with the labels ‘refugee’ and asylum seeker. So we want people to look beyond that label and see people as doctors, nurses, farmers – the type of roles that people normally do.”

We’ll start with Aldijana, a 27 year-old Bosnian solicitor who fled the Balkans conflict with her family in 1995.

Aldijana doesn’t define herself as a refugee. She says, “that is a small part of who a person is. Professionally, I’m a solicitor but I’m also a daughter, a sister, a partner and a friend.”

Aldijana now works as a lawyer specialising in immigration issues. She says that worryingly, some of her clients are reporting that the label “asylum seeker” is used as a term of abuse by schoolchildren, when of course, all it means is that someone is seeking refuge.

This was not the case when Aldijana arrived. She says that she and her family “welcomed with open arms,” as people in their new neighbourhood offered them food and provisions to help them settle in.

So why the change? Why are people now suspicious of asylum seekers, and why are people from past conflicts, whether in  Bosnia, Kosovo or Nazi Germany, remembered as people deserving sanctuary, while those fleeing the current conflicts are treated with suspicion?

The past brushes over previous hostility. Animosity towards people who have been here a long time has been airbrushed. The historian Tony Kushner says that past refugees are celebrated in retrospect. They are held up as paragons of virtue – as an ‘elite group’  – against the less deserving people seeking sanctuary today.

The right-wing press swallows this line of retrospective celebration wholeheartedly. Refugees from the 1999 war in Kosovo are somehow ‘good refugees’, warmly accepted as part of that celebrated elite. In contrast, a man fleeing the Congo or Sudan is a ‘bogus asylum seeker’ (though such a term is technically nonsense). A gypsy, despite relentless persecution and the rise of anti-gypsy far right extremists in Europe, is always treated as a ‘bad asylum seeker, simply because he or she is a gypsy.

In reality, we know very little about the individual situations of asylum seekers today. We must stop this terrible abuse of history, and start listening carefully to individual voices, past and present.

Mark South points out that if we do listen to the voices of refugees, we can realise that these are real people with their own unique reasons for coming to the UK, and their own lives to rebuild.

“Refugees come in all shapes and sizes, and they have been through a lot to get here,” he tells me. “Hopefully, Look Beyond The Label can make people aware of the reality of the situation for refugeees.”

Look Beyond The Label

Look Beyond the Label

I’m changing my status for the Red Cross campaign, Look Beyond The Label. (LBTL) I urge you to look at the videos – not just the one on the main page, but the individual stories of Eric, Aldijana and others. I’ll put them up soon, and we’ll see what the Red Cross told me about the aims of the campaign.

Change your status, too. Publicise the campaign. Click ‘Show your Support’ on the LBTL website

It’s really important that as many people as possible see the real lives behind the refugees: the situation they leave behind, what they do for a living, their personality. It can change their perception, and make people more open to refugees and asylum seekers.

More soon. Off to bed.

Refugee Week

This week is Refugee Week 2009 in the UK and Saturday is World Refugee Day.

So what is a refugee? A refugee is an individual who has fled their country and has  been granted asylum somewhere else. An asylum seeker is someone who is seeking refugee status.

Added to this, we have internally displaced persons  (IDPs): those who are uprooted from their homes but cannot cross the border of their country.

The term ‘refugee’ is often used to group together refugees and asylum seekers because the term ‘asylum seeker’ attracts a lot of vitriol and has an unfortunate stigma attached to it.

The UN agency for refugees (UNHCR) says the total number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons stands at approximately 42 million. Add to that an additional 2 million people fleeing the Swat valley and hundreds of thousands fleeing the conflict in Sri Lanka.  Thanks to Amy Olsson, who posted an interesting video as a comment in response to my last post. The video (below) helps to make these staggeringly large numbers of people a bit more understandable (in the middle it becomes an advert for Microsoft for a while, but it’s a good starting place).

In order us to really understand the desperate situations from which people need protection, we need to see the people  behind the conflict. These are not just faceless foreign people arriving on our shores; they are individuals with their own separate lives, and their own reasons for coming here. As Steve Ballinger from Amnesty International put it to me, “If you think of a doctor fleeing religious persecution, that gives a much more rounded picture than saying the guy is an asylum seeker, doesn’t it?”

Refugee Week gives us a fantastic insight into the lives of refugees. And tomorrow, we’ll see just how it’s doing that. Among the campaigns we’ll be featuring is Look Beyond The Label, a brilliant scheme run by The British Red Cross. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Reviving the blog

Stop press! Nicholas Edward Bishop is blogging again.

The blog began as a response to a series of online journalism lectures I attended. Now, the blog will be brought back from the dead… and the incredible musings of Nick will once again be broadcast to the world. I just know you’re quaking with excitement.

This week is Refugee Week in the UK. (15-21 June 2009). Up for discussion will be: Do we need to change the way we think about refugees and does the media treat refugees with like shit? (Short answer: yes).

Join me in life-changing conversations about everything…. politics, film, sport,  and my tempestuous relationship with Hollywood actress Natalie Portman. OK, so I made the last one up.

But it will be good.

MyFootballWriter. A new approach to sports journalism. Or geeks talking football.

I can only imagine what non-football fans must have felt at the start of our online journalism lecture a few days ago. Whoa! A technology enthusiast talking about football! This is why I get up on a Thursday morning!  But guest lecturer Rick Waghorn skilfully linked the talk to wider issues in journalism, and the non-football fans, or heathen masses, as I like to call them, woke up again.

Rick owns MyFootballWriter, aimed at fans of teams outside the Premier League. The site is exploiting several niches in the online journalism market  No… I haven’t lost it, or taken on a job as Rick’s PR man.  I know there is tonnes of stuff out there about football, as the heathens keep reminding me.

Let me give you an example. As a supporter of lowly little AFC Bournemouth (currently languishing near the bottom of the entire Football League), I represent a very small proportion of the population. But nonetheless, there’s still quite a few of us and we’re quite passionate about the club. Cos we’re sad. So, if there was a reporter on MyFootballWriter covering AFC Bournemouth, he would be catering for that small, but dangerously overenthusiastic, niche.

Sadly, at the moment, due to the financial pressures of the recession, MyFootballWriter only has reports about Norwich and Ipswich, since that area is Rick’s patch. If you’re a Norwich or Ipswich fan then you get great stuff about your club. If you are not a supporter of these clubs then you’re probably not itching to get the latest footy news from Carrow Road (if you are… well… you’re a sad git.)

However, the point is that there are various niche communities of passionate footy fans who want more info about their club. Some might say that a host of websites for these people exist already. But the big advantage of MyFootballWriter is its interactivity.

Fans can post on the website, and engage in conversations with reporters and other readers.  This can be done in a variety of ways. They can post on Twitter and use a HashTag specific to their club (e.g. precede message with #NCFC for Norwich). Or they can use  Jaiku (a Twitter-like app). Rick has recently teamed up with Channel Four’s 4ip to make all this possible.

Plus, it has to be said: other footy outlets just aren’t very good for small teams. The BBC football website doesn’t concentrate much effort into breaking news about a tiny little team like Bournemouth.  Sky Sports News, a TV channel, has very little coverage of lower leagues. SSN is best for unintentional comedy value. The endless ten-minute loops of stories make it feel like a bizarre version of Ground Hog Day.  But I urge you to watch it for the seemingly  boundless enthusiasm the presenters put into their work… it really is quite admirable. Plus, the contrived flirting between the male and female presenters is so bad, it’s great…..  Oh God. I’m so, so sad.

When it comes to national newspaper coverage of small teams, it sometimes borders on the ridiculous. The Telegraph site for its AFC Bournemouth stories calls us ‘Bournemouth FC’ at the moment. The paper also ran an article saying  that we survived a possible ‘giantkilling’ from amateurs Blyth Spartans the other day. Get with it, guys. Drop the cliché. The only way Bournemouth will ever qualify as giants is if we play a team featuring Bashful, Doc and Dopey.

At the moment, in order to read decent football reporting on your club, you need the local press or independent fan sites. The problem with independent fan sites is that they don’t always have much reporter’s nous – they’re not first to a story. They just break it in a different way to the press release on the club websites.

There are some exceptions, but these tend to be very offbeat fansites. There’s anarchic comedy at a Huddersfield Town website. (It’s not often that I get to write a sentence like that.) Check HTFC World. But this isn’t really a news website. There’s no real reporting. It’s just a bit of a laugh.

So, MyFootballWriter is a useful alternative to the local press. And as a web only publication, it should be quicker than the online postings of your local paper.

Plus, this online community football community is obviously accessible from anywhere. If you follow a team like Rotherham or Doncaster, you don’t have to be living there any more. You may have done the sensible thing and got the hell out of there. But you can still follow your team. What’s more, on this site, you can easily chat to those poor sods unlucky enough to be still living in Rotherham.

So, if, like me, you’ a fan of some shoddy, under-reported team, then hopefully, you’ll soon have a footy site staffed by quality journos. Let’s hope MyFootballWriter takes off.

It won’t make your team any less crap, though.

BNP frontman Barnbrook writes on Telegraph website…

Last week, I was amazed to discover that top BNP official Richard Barnbrook is allowed to maintain his own blog on My Telegraph, the paper’s blogging platform aimed at Telegraph readers.

Now, I don’t have a problem with Barnbrook blogging at The Telegraph. Strangely, my gut reaction at the moment says that I may have a problem with Barnbrook blogging at a popular tabloid, such as The Sun. Is this fear at all rational? What do you think? Let me know.

When I first heard about Barnbrook’s blog, I could sense a rage boiling inside me. Outrage! Totally unacceptable! Doubtless, my younger self would have continued on this track. I would have been writing furious emails to The Telegraph lambasting them for hosting someone with such views.

An anti-BNP rally in Liverpool. Photo by Pete Carr

But I didn’t send any angry emails. I’m happy to let Barnbrook air his crazed views on My Telegraph. Perhaps, I wondered, I have become like many My Telegraph users, a free speech evangelist. Shane Richmond, Online Communities Editor at the Daily Telegraph, tells me that users have the noble conviction that anyone should be allowed to say what they like, as long as it’s within the law.

But have I really become a free speech afficianado? Or is this tolerance of Barnbrook simply because I think he will gain no more support through blog at The Telegraph?

Barnbrook set up his blog in order to write under the banner of a mainstream title. He perhaps wanted to gain a veneer of respectability, and perhaps attract a few Telegraph readers. (My Telegraph’s user base is, as intended, mainly Telegraph readers).

But most Telegraph readers are not going to warm to Barnbrook’s rantings about immigrants the threat immigrants pose to supposedly “indigenous” British people. (see this blog post). He clearly doesn’t have many fans. The odd one or two crackpots occasionally voice their support (probably from outside). A fair few heckle him. Most just ignore him, or don’t even know he’s there.

So, Barnbrook blogging on My Telegraph is pretty harmless. But what if the mass circulation tabloids had a similar platform – would I think it acceptable for Barnbrook to blog in The Sun?

Now, things get tricky. Why? Well, despite The Sun’s frequent denunciations of the BNP, it can occasionally produce a not very considered, xenophobic line. While not as bad as poor-selling titles like The Express, The Sun has been known to bash immigrants, ethnic or religious minorities, and especially asylum seekers. And it has occasionally done so in a particularly aggressive manner.

Witness The Sun’s famous “Swan Bake” story, alleging that asylum seekers were eating swans. It’s now been taken off because it’s totally untrue. (See here on Press Gazette) Or, last Christmas, the expression of festive goodwill to all men in “O come all ye asylum seekers”. The article features the sympathetic caption “asylum seeker scoffs free dinner”, and makes sure it gripes about Muslims. Alternatively, look at today’s Sun leader, The Enemy Within, which contains the incendiary line… “Nobody knows how many Muslims here today are plotting mayhem”.

Now, I am in no way saying that The Sun is a fascist paper, or that its editorial views are close to the BNP. Just that, occasionally, its articles tread a dangerous line. So, Barnbrook could make some headway here.

Take Barnbrook’s tirade “Blame The Immigrants.” Am I wrong to be worried that a few Sun readers may believe his ridiculous assertion that “most knife crime is committed by immigrants and the sons of immigrants”

Often, he chooses his words carefully, and does not openly state his white supremacist goals. Instead, he codes it with insidious (and technically nonsensical) rhetoric about threat to the “indigenous” population. Am I wrong for thinking that, with a bit of thought, Barnbrook could make inroads if he hosted his blog on a Sun site aimed at Sun readers?

What do you think of Barnbrook’s Telegraph blog? Should it be there? And would you worry if he had a blog on a tabloid?? Let me know.

Richard Barnbrook’s Crazy World

Barnbrook says… Blame The Immigrants

“Yes….It is the immigrants…. The real crime is on the streets, and it is the young people who are being attacked every day now by knives and guns. Most of it is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”

In the same article, Barnbrook says it is apt that the word therapist can be split into ‘the rapist’

“But our British young people are a resilient lot. They [victims of knife crime] will get over it and the best thing they can do is supress it and move on. The last thing they should do is start going to those disgusting lefty therapists for counselling to relive the trauma. Look at that word “therapist” the rapist….and that is what they do….the rape of the mind.”

I kid you not. He said that. Check it if you don’t believe me.