‘Mayor should confront National Express’

How Bristol responds to the incident of a Muslim man being thrown off a National Express service to London will tell us a lot about where we are.

Ibrahim paid for his ticket and boarded the coach to London. As soon as he sat down, a passenger asked to speak to the driver. Another member of staff in a National Express uniform then came on to the coach and asked the man to get off.

National Express claim they were responding to a number of passengers complaining about bulky luggage. That conflicts with a passenger’s testimony that the complainant told the driver Ibrahim looked ‘shifty’. National Express also claim he became abusive when asked to leave the coach. That conflicts with the testimony of another passenger who says he didn’t protest but just got off.

The only response that will be good enough for Bristol is an unqualified demand for answers. And this demand has to come from the top of the city, from the mayor himself. This cannot be left to play out on the pages of the press supplemented by the chaos of the comments and then managed out of public awareness while we refocus on the nice things. The issues it raises are a minefield the city needs to be led through.

I will suggest a few points for consideration.

National Express categorically deny any Islamophobia, but any such confidence must be based on evidence. This is not about presuming the worst. It’s about dealing with the world as it has been and is. It is also about dealing respectfully with the integrity of the testimony of the passengers who spoke up.

In the least worst scenario we could be dealing with a situation whereby a passenger was badly treated and the situation handled so badly that other passengers believed it was discriminatory. If the passengers’ testimonies are true, then we have something that happened in Bristol that is overtly discriminatory and likely illegal.

While this incident presents as wholly distasteful, we should not be afraid of the opportunity it presents Bristol to be intentional about the kind of society we want to be. How we live with each other across racial, religious, national and ethnic differences, where historical wrongs, economic opportunity and political power map out according to those differences, are among the most pressing questions of our time.

A good society will not come along unless we do it on purpose. This incident could be a reminder of this and a reminder that while we must celebrate the great stories of Bristol, we must not be seduced into believing that is the full story of Bristol. We cannot take a better future for granted.

Bad things sometimes happen. It’s how we understand those things and then respond that says who we are and where we are coming from. We cannot take “a few bad apples” approach to incidents like this.

Political leaders must look for the political cause and response. They will recognise a context in which political leaders have stoked up the language of “the other” describing human beings as swarms and badly handled a national debate on British identity.

They will recognise the development of a politics that tells relatively powerless people (the working poor for example) to blame other relatively powerless people (welfare recipients or migrants) for their situation.

They will recognise the use of a politics of fear of change and the unfamiliar to build loyalty to the known of the past and present and the status quo even when it doesn’t work for them. Political leaders must challenge these false narratives when they come from other leaders and when they begin to take root in the population. 

There was another comment by someone claiming to be a passenger witness. They said it wasn’t about Islamophobia but that the man was mentally unwell. This would not strengthen the case of National Express or the passenger who complained. It only sheds light on the discrimination faced by people with mental ill health, a discrimination that is powerful enough to destroy lives itself, but is compounded when it intersects with race and class.

There is a major piece of work right now in the city under Time To Change aiming to break down stigma and discrimination around mental ill health. Mental ill health does not undermine your right to the services you pay for. We wont stand for that.

The mayor must lead on this. He must have National Express in his office. He must draw on the expertise of organisations such as Stand Against Racism and Inequality. And he must make a firm commitment to supporting the role Bristol’s community development workers and schools who play such a critical role in building our communities, city identity and values. We can’t have incidents like this. Not on our watch.