The Government’s shameful scapegoating of immigrants

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

The Home Office is on a mission to intimidate Kipling’s “fluttered folk and wild” abroad and in the UK.

It is proud to be institutionally racist, very proud indeed. It has figures to show just how many bloody foreigners have been dealt with and what awaits the others. In June a new £3,000 bond was imposed on visitors from “high risk” nations in Asia and Africa; overseas students from those continents are actively discouraged from coming to our universities. Blatantly discriminatory rules have been instituted; international treaties and human rights legislation are neglected. The nation is dishonoured again by its keepers.

On Friday, on BBC News, Home Office bully boys were shown rounding up dark-skinned folk in specially targeted multiracial localities. In Southall in  west London, outraged Asian women defied them and objected volubly. Some were from Southall Black Sisters, a collective which, for years, has defended gender and minority rights. I recognised some  – grey-haired now, but still full of indignation and passion. In previous decades they demonstrated against virginity tests for Asian women, carried out to check if they were really brides-to-be. And again against the law which denied foreign-born wives legal status for years. And again when the National Front marched through Southall.

The scenes on TV reminded me of South Africa’s pass laws. I broke down and cried inconsolably. Before this latest official  persecution, Home Office vans were spotted in inner-city areas with nasty signs telling illegal migrants to go home. The messages subliminally warned all people of colour not to get too comfortable, to assume we were safe. We who came to stay jumped through hoops of fire to gain some acceptance. But now we know it can be withdrawn. Nasty vans were not sent to areas where Australians and white South Africans hang out. The  barrister  Geoffrey Robertson, his novelist wife Kathy Lette or MP Peter Hain were not made to feel uninvited and unwanted. When will our governments stop pissing on non-white migrants? Will they ever? My kids look like me – I fear for them too.

Ukip’s Nigel Farage, now presenting himself as Mr Nice Guy, has criticised these Home Office initiatives. More bizarrely still, the Tory strategist, Australian Lynton Crosby, has privately expressed his own doubts about the vans. This is the controversial political operator who, in his own country, and the UK has used immigration as an election doodlebug. I told him at a party how much I detested these campaigns and he listened, unmoved, blasé. So why the reservations now about the hardline Home Office tactics? Is it part of Crosby’s cunning plan to disable Ukip? Or have even these unreconstructed men sensed that a line has been crossed?

London has just tried to relive the glorious multiracial Olympics. Oh how our PM and his mates loved all that colour and pizzazz. And all the while his Government forces landlords, medical staff and schools to check passports and exclude those who can’t prove they belong. Immigration detention centres, run by private companies, treat inmates like vermin. Not many white faces in there. Western Europeans have always migrated and still do, as if that is their birthright. But the movement of people from elsewhere is a threat, a menace, even when millions are dispossessed by Western geopolitical games and economic interests.

In our times, we are not permitted to call racism by its name when debating immigration. That discourse is strictly regulated. Immigration is now allegedly completely decoupled from prejudices. Furthermore, it is claimed that Britons are not “allowed” to talk about immigration for fear of being branded “racist”. When did we not talk about the “problems of immigration”? Has there been a single year when known public individuals did not express “brave” views against migration or express xenophobia? Today neo-Powellite nationalists like David Goodhart are lauded as messiahs and the twinned Frank Field and Nicholas Soames regurgitate the messages of anti-immigration lobbyists with enviable access to the media. Britons who are fair and open-minded are appalled by the ceaseless hostility towards incomers. They daren’t speak out because of the overpowering pressure to follow the populist line. Trolls are out to get us too.

The Tories always use the race/immigration card. They don’t even pretend inclusion any more. Shawn Bailey, the Tory black “street” mascot in Downing Street has been dumped; Sayeeda Warsi is back in the ghetto. Meanwhile New Labour, even while encouraging immigration, did not defend it and instead assuaged small island protectionists. But the most culpable are the black and Asian MPs and peers, an unprecedented number now in power, soon to be joined by Doreen Lawrence. So far hardly any have spoken out about the Home Office travesties. Those Southall women had more guts. They could form a cross-party faction and expose the racist immigration policies. Together they would be strong enough to make an impact. But the MPs and peers sit tight, treacherously let the state repeat and exceed the iniquities of the past suffered by their own people, families, possibly themselves. I think I am going to cry again.

We need a Eurosceptic party of the centre left

I left Ukip, the party I founded, when it became a magnet for bigots. But what happened to left wing opposition to the EU?

• 
• • Alan Sked
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 May 2013 09.00 BST

'There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it' Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

The idea of reshaping the world, changing it for the better, is probably a natural, if not a divine one. However, the lure of progress can be deceptive. "Great enterprises" of the kind Charles de Gaulle in his memoirs famously associated with the role of France in the world, come regularly unstuck. The latest grand projet of the French rational mind, the EU, is now coming apart at the seams. Rather like the 18th-century "enlightened despotisms" inspired by the French philosophes, our contemporary bureaucratic autocracy now faces revolution. The peasants of Greece, Spain, Italy and elsewhere are revolting. Even the French peasants are displaying a worrying restlessness.

Progressivism everywhere has a long history of dreadful mistakes. Just look at Marxism. Today, both China and North Korea testify to its illusions as monuments to failed progressivism. So, however, is the EU. Built on progressive myths ("It has brought peace to Europe"; "it extends democracy"; "it creates prosperity"), it is now in relative economic, demographic and technological decline, lacks accountable or transparent structures of government, and is damning future generations to unemployment and despair. It is run by a self-serving, bureaucratic and political elite, is notoriously corrupt, and is admired only by politicians from the Middle East or Africa who bewail their own lack of unity, or by Americans who see its member nations as the colonies of 1776. Its policies are undemocratic – it has forced unelected, technocratic governments on both Italy and Greece – and do not work. Its single currency has brought penury to half a continent. Its present existential crisis has brought political chaos to Italy, Greece and Spain and threatens the same in France.

 Dr Alan Sked launches the UK Independence party in 1993. Photograph: STR News/Reuters

Here in Britain David Cameron's "progressive conservatism" is being challenged by Ukip, the party I founded 20 years ago and left in 1997 as it became a magnet for people whose vision of the future is the 1950s – a supposed golden age before the EEC, black people, Muslims and other immigrants, gays, lesbians and other products of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, desecrated this island Eden.

On the left, however, there has been no response to events in Europe. The Labour party seems intellectually paralysed in face of both the economic and political crises in Europe. The Lib Dems remain knee-jerk "good Europeans" with absolutely nothing to say. They are like the officer on the Titanic who, when warned of the iceberg, ordered "full steam ahead". The great Liberal party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George opposed European empires. Gladstone famously asked where on the map the Habsburgs had ever done any good? But today's Lib Dem pygmies give unquestioned support to our new Habsburg empire ruled from Brussels.

There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it. But then Jacques Delors told the TUC that whereas they were impotent to defeat Thatcherism, he could and would overthrow it from Brussels. Almost overnight, Labour's patriotism disappeared and the party stood on its head. Brussels had managed to divide and rule Britain. The Welsh windbag, Kinnock, even became an EU commissioner and made a tax-free fortune doing nothing for the public interest but sacking whistleblowers in the corrupt EU bureaucracy. His must be the most pathetic career in postwar British politics. Blair and Mandelson, of course followed suit (although Blair failed to get an EU presidency) and – amazingly – this whole discredited clique still advocates that Britain join the euro.

An alternative, moderate party of the centre left should seek a new path for Britain. To avoid the trap of deluded, world-historical progressivism, it should remain firmly fixed on these objectives:

1. Direct, transparent, accountable democracy

2. Liberal values that protect the individual from discrimination on grounds of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion or political belief and uphold freedom of speech, freedom of the press and media, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, and freedom from arbitrary arrest

3. A social policy which seeks to provide decent pensions, care, social housing, welfare benefits and full employment to all in need after a sound education that caters to everyone's talents (including those with disabilities).

4. A foreign policy that protects British national interests without thereby threatening those of others. This would involve withdrawing from the EU and negotiating free trade with our European friends and neighbours. Britain would not need to withdraw from Nato or the UN and would continue to seek peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. It would also continue to support the principle of giving overseas aid.

5. Domestically, the most radical changes, apart from ending an austerity aimed mainly at the poor, might be constitutional. It might be wise to federalise the UK and make the House of Lords an elected federal chamber. Perhaps an independent Britain could negotiate a confederation of the British Isles with the Irish Republic to help solve Ireland's problems.

Certainly, an independent Britain should be outward looking. As for the EU, there is no reason to assume automatically that it would survive a British exit. Other member states might prefer to choose democracy and independence. All Europe would be in a democratic flux. But let that democratic revolution start here.

Beware of the rabid right, not the loony left

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN

Sunday 14 April 2013

In the wake of Thatcher's death it has been shown once again that the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces are on the right

On January 30th 1978, the day my son was born, Margaret Thatcher charmingly told white TV viewers their country was in danger of being “swamped” by other cultures. Enoch Powell’s gory warnings about black and Asian immigration  were rebranded and detoxified by the wily, well groomed, Lady Tory and embedded in the nation’s psyche. Her words were calculated, and won her populist support and admirers within her party. Sixteen months later she became PM.

In the ceaseless cacophony following her death, scant attention has been paid to her supremacist views of Empire (Bruge Speech, 1992) or the race riots, or the many deaths in custody of black men, or government-sanctioned unfair policing, or her deep hostility to immigrants of colour or concomitant warmth towards white Zimbabweans and South Africans. As the blogger Jacqueline Scott writes: “Racism fattened under Thatcher”. Forgotten too is her vendetta against the GLC and ILEA, those London bodies that did not fall in line with her little-Englandism. The politically correct, radical right has silenced all such talk and much more besides.

Make no mistake, the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces today are on the right, not on the so called “loony left”. Last week the right hysterically attacked the Diana Fund for supporting a pro-immigration organisation. Diana was a friend to the outsider and the despised; yet those she was close to are kicking off about this funding. The same reactionary battalions stopped the BBC from fully playing a song that legitimately got into the top of the charts, because it “insults” the hallowed Tory matriarch. Most of our newspapers are on the right and they push, and sometimes bully, broadcasters into that same ideological space. Fearful of bad headlines, the BBC meekly accommodates their propaganda – and so the right gets bolder and more demanding.

I was on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff as a panellist all week and expressed unfashionably critical assessments of the Thatcher era. Some of the reactions I received made me wonder if I should better conceal or disguise my deeply-held socialist, anti-racist  views. Walking through Whiteleys, where the programmes are recorded, a group crowded and abused me. Some were racist, others insulting or filthy. It was horrible. Back home, onto my screen came more from the rabid-right PC brigade. They are offended by anyone who disagrees. Dissent, to them, is treason, an embodiment of the enemy within (Lady Thatcher’s term for striking miners).        

Every day we, the people, are instructed on what we should say, think and feel. To belong, we must not only praise Lady Thatcher for her greatness, but also be foolish, doting royalists, hate the poor, approve of welfare cuts, hate the unions, reject the principle of equality and proclaim immigration as a threat. Lady Thatcher, the Boudicca of the fanatical right, reclaimed the kingdom for them and they remain powerful, unbeatable and unbearable.