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The disgusting racism of our modern society

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding cellist has passport cancelled by Home Office
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is unable to travel after he applied for second passport to help with visa applications when performing abroad

Typical, eh?

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are in contact with Mr Kanneh-Mason to resolve this situation and apologise for any inconvenience caused. A replacement passport will be issued as soon as possible.”

Oh.

This is despite his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason, an award-winning pianist, submitting the same paperwork 15 minutes apart and receiving both the original and second passport within a week.

So, just a fuck up in the bureaucracy.

And as to the disgusting racism of modern British society:

Sheku Kanneh-Mason MBE (born 4 April 1999) is a British cellist who won the 2016 BBC Young Musician award

Oh, right.

Kanneh-Mason grew up in Nottingham, England. He was born to Stuart Mason, a luxury hotel business manager from Antigua, and Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh, a former lecturer at the University of Birmingham, from Sierra Leone.

Child of immigrants, shows talent, is educated and lauded for that talent.

At the age of nine, he passed the Grade 8 cello examination with the highest marks in the UK,[7][8] and won the Marguerite Swan Memorial Prize.[9] Also aged nine he won an ABRSM junior scholarship to join the Junior Academy of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was tutored by Ben Davies.[1][10][11] Kanneh-Mason received his non-specialist education as a pupil at the Trinity School, Nottingham,[11] where he studied for A levels in Music, Maths and Physics.

Aren’t we just the most racist, exclusionary, society ever?

11 thoughts on “The disgusting racism of our modern society”

  1. Sheku, unlike his sister Isata, has been mixed up with a couple of shady characters trying to undermine thew monarchy.

  2. @Rhoda Klapp
    ‘ Bloody spell check ought to have caught that, who uses thew in the singular?’

    When correctly spelled: thou.

  3. This used to be a useful trick for getting around various border regimes. I.e. if you have an israel stamp in your passport you might have trouble (more trouble) going into various arab countries. So you have one passport stamped for those trips and another for presenting to the saudi customs.

  4. Eh, I went into HM Passport Office in Pimlico over a decade ago and there wasn’t a single white face to be seen among the staff.

    Mibbe the racists all work in the back office?

  5. Steve
    I see things have improved somewhat. When I visited the Pimlico office (Petty France) twenty years ago most of the staff appeared not to speak English and of those who did it was their second language.

    I can think of two reasons for this.
    One, immigrants fear prejudice but know that government recruitment is colour blind.
    Two, many immigrants come from countries where a cushy government sinecure is the way to get ahead.

  6. “A levels in Music, Maths and Physics.” So better educated than almost the whole of the House of Commons and most of the House of Lords.

  7. It’s a working hypothesis that most racism in this country, and 100% of reported racism in the Guardian, is of this variety:

    (1) Something bad happened to me.
    (2) I am black.
    Therefore: the bad thing is motivated by racism.

    This egocentric view of the world ignores the bad stuff that happens to everybody else in the world and, by misattributing the cause, ensures that that bad stuff will continue to happen to everybody else. Forever.

  8. As Hallowed Be said,

    Used to be a quite common thing. As I recall, the Israelis would often give you a visa on a separate piece of paper if you asked, so as to allow you to use your passport for Arab countries without additional problems.

    When I was in the RCAF,(back then still Air Command of the Canadian Forces), in Air Transport Command, we typically had three passports. One was the normal blue covered one which we got ourselves for private travel when on leave/with the family, and two green covered ones. One was good for five years, one for two years, but got extended for an additional two years and then one year. The green covered ones identified you as a “government official”, as it was an an official “government”passport, a step below diplomatic. We had to get our pictures taken for them in shirt-and-tie but NOT in uniform. The purpose was to keep the Israeli and Syrian visas separate.

    We used to participate in peacekeeping on the Golan and used to bring people in from one side, and supplies from the other, and so needed to keep the visas separate. The supply runs thru Damascus were very popular with the crews, as you got to go and buy gold (particularly “puzzle rings” which were practically a badge of office for transport crews), and VERY cheap bootleg CDs and DVDs from the bazaar.

    When I was a young Second Lieutenant working in Squadron Ops, one of my duties was “Passport and Visa” officer, and my job was to control custody of the various passports, and make sure that various visas, and/or SOF (Status of Forces) agreement paperwork was done for whatever foreign operations we were doing. I had a card file cabinet full of passports. In theory, you would give your blue “civilian” passport to me for safekeeping when drawing whichever green one you needed, as you were not supposed to have more than one in your possession at a time. In practice, this was not always done.

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