Drum: DEMOCRACY II
Labour wants to introduce ID cards – a licence to
stop, search and harass those ‘walking under the
influence of melanin’ if ever there was one – and
tighten immigration to keep out the unskilled.
Zipping around in a helicopter to effectively launch
the election campaign, Tony Blair landed in Leeds,
home to one of the largest Asian communities in
Britain, to announce ‘Your country’s borders are
protected’.
The Tories struck back promising to rip up the
Geneva Convention that would have saved Michael
Howard’s own grandmother in the Holocaust, bar
asylum seekers with an arbitrary quota and enforce
compulsory HIV tests for new immigrants.
Labour’s response was not to confront the bigotry
explicit in these demands but to pander to them,
claiming they have similar procedures already in
place.
In this racist auction of principle and morality –
the issue of equality is barely up for consideration –
only one group wins – the racists. For when it
comes down to it, if it’s foreigners you hate – be
they people from afar or people whom you think
should be banished to a far away place – why go for
sloppy seconds when you can have the real thing in
the BNP. It didn’t have to be like this. In the heady
days of Macpherson we saw the potential for
building a far more progressive consensus based on
the notion that racial equality was at the centre of
any bid Britain might make to mature modernity.
Now leadership of that project has been abandoned,
it is open season on racial minorities. According to
an ICM poll two-thirds of people agree with Howard’s
proposals; viewers of the ITV show V ote For M e
overwhelmingly backed Rodney Hylton-Potts, who
advocated zero immigration, as the