Following the right wing attacks on Stormzy’s Brit Awards intervention, Julie Al-Hinai fights back with a letter to Amanda Platell

Hi Amanda,
It is with sheer disdain I read your article on Stormzy, shameful and racist in so many aspects.

Stormzy’s mother was a citizen of a country subjected to British colonialism, one that had suffered at the hands of imperial extraction. However, Ghana is stable, democratic and developing, despite its history of brutal colonialism. Your article was disrespectful to this nation as well as to her.

The fact that Stormzy did well at school is admirable, as it is for any young person growing up in disadvantaged and excluded conditions of modern Great Britain . Would it have been any more or less so had he been white? Would it have been worthy of noting?

To suggest he has no right to speak up for the millions of citizens, black or white, or any shade in between, who are continuously exploited and socially excluded by governments following the neo-liberal policies of extraction, rent, deregulation, privatisation and deliberate subjugation of the working class, is rather contentious. Who do you speak for and do you have more right than he?

As to Grenfell, how dare you suggest the May government response has been “generous”?
It has not even been adequate.
Where was it on the days following the fire? Where has it been since? We are 9 months on and the community continues to suffer. Were you there? No I don’t think so!

I was. I can only beg empathy when telling you I was doing my best to console families while recording the details, names, identifying details and content of the last desperate phone calls of their loved ones. Where was the State then? Where were you?

Have you or anyone else of the establishment ever questioned why it was the likes of me that were the first responders? 
Yes! it’s simple people like me, like the Muslim community, like the hundreds of other lay volunteers who stepped up in those first few days and continue to speak out, against this outrageous and unnecessary loss of innocent lives. Many of those lives receiving state attention for the first time in the tragedy of their unnecessary deaths by State abandonment.

Don’t you dare deride a man who uses his well earned notoriety to draw attention, not only to the abject tragedy of the Grenfell fire but to the entirely inadequate and uncaring response to it.
Where were your words on 14th of June last year and where have they been since?

Your article was, as in line with the editorial policy of the publication, derisive, divisive, disrespectful and wholly racist. As you sit comfortably in your power tower using your words to breed hatred, I implore you to take stock, reflect and redirect your viciousness to where it is morally required; at the seat of government in the “house” Stormzy had the “tenacity” and morality to metaphorically call to be burned down. A more timely call I can’t imagine.

Shame on you Amanda and the cronies that pay your salary. By the way, where do you bank your earnings and more importantly where does Murdock bank his?

I for one, would rather dance to Stormzy’s tune than the likes of yours and your despicable racist paymasters and I don’t believe I’d be alone in that dance.

May Stormzy continue to spit his bars where they matter while you swallow yours. Big up to him!

Yours 
Julie Al-Hinai

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