Prejudice Isn't Daring; It's Boring

So, yes, we all know that Rod Liddle's shtick is to try and be as offensive as possible so that he can chuckle at those po-faced ninnies who dare to be offended by his courageous insistence to tell it like it really is. But like his comrades Clarkson and Littlejohn Liddle confuses being offensive with being provocative. The latter requires that you be, you know, interesting. Here's Rod however:

'The first of an occasional series – those benefits of a multi-cultural Britain in full. Let me introduce you all to this human filth.

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.'

My word! How daring! How delightfully refreshing to see someone trot out the kind of tired, stale prejudice you can find in thousands of boozers across the country! Or at any BNP meeting, for that matter.

As Charlotte Gore points out, if you're going to do this sort of thing it does help if you can at least get your facts right. The majority of crime in London is committed by white people. I assume that you know this, which makes me wonder why you didn't limit yourself to saying that young black men commit a disproportionate amount of crime and that the arrest rate for blacks is 3.8 times that of white people? Then again, we're familiar with this and so perhaps limiting yourself to an observation that is, like, true wouldn't be shocking enough would it? And nor, of course, would actually addressing problems.

But it's your suggestion that blackness is somehow the cause of these problems that is shameful. Worse than even that, mind you, is your insinuation that if only we could send Black Britons back to Africa and the Caribbean we wouldn't have any of these problems because, you know, it's all the fault of "multi-culturalism". If that were true one wonders why Glasgow's murder rate is two and a half times that of London. It's not because there are gangs of McYardies terrorising entire communities. I'd also suggest that comparing offending rates between black graduates and those who fail to even sit, let alone pass, their A-Levels might reveal that class, educational achievement and any number of other factors might have a little more to do with crime rates than pigmentation.

(For that matter, have a look at any Victorian edition of the News of the World and you'll find a rich, even loving, catalogue of any number of horrendous crimes that, again, reminds one that skin colour is not a useful metric for measuring man's depravity. Correlation does not equal causation.)

There is, however, one area in which the reactionaries have a point: the left's inclination to see people as members of a group rather than individuals is tedious and, often, less than productive. Which makes one wonder why you insist on doing likewise, lumping all blacks (and all muslims) together as though skin colour or religion reveal, determine or dictate everything. Personally, I prefer to see people as individuals.

Accusations of racism are often too easily made and perhaps you don't care if you're so labelled. But if you do then perhaps you should cease peddling nonsense that a reasonable person might reasonably consider racist. This isn't a question of being "politically correct" it's just a matter of behaving in a decent fashion.

Spectator

Overcoming barriers to integration

Towns and cities across the UK are expected to be far more ethnically diverse in future.

Most are unlikely to end up resembling the Wood Green district of Haringey in north London, which ranks among the most culturally mixed boroughs in the country.

As a government-appointed commission comes up with new recommendations to improve relations between migrants and local communities in England, what do its residents feel about integration? The commission considers the inability to speak English to be the single biggest barrier to integration.

John Okono, 28, came to the UK from Nigeria - an English-speaking country - three years ago and can see how some of the immigrant friends he has made have become isolated because of a lack of language skills. Mr Okono, who is working as a security guard as he studies for a masters degree, can see himself applying for British citizenship one day.

"Whenever you come to a different country you have to integrate yourself with the culture and speaking the language is a very important part of that," he said.

It is a point not lost on charity worker Patricia Rodgers, who was brought up in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s and has lived in Haringey for three years, after a spell in Spain teaching English.

"It's definitely important for people to learn the language," she said. "I have taught it here to a lot of the Polish community and I'm going to start doing it again on a voluntary basis as there's a big need for it."

New shops

The shops of Wood Green, like most suburbs of London, offer clues to the changing make-up of its population.

Greek and Turkish-run grocers sit side-by-side Afro-Caribbean food retailers, Halal butchers and stores selling eastern European provisions. Accommodation advertisements in Polish, Russian and Chinese now appear in newsagent windows.

According to the 2001 Census, about 33% of Haringey's population of 216,000 were born outside the UK. White British people made up 45% of its residents.

Another message from people in Wood Green is that mixing with other residents is the key to becoming a more integrated community.

Emerging from a bagel shop is technician Mohammed Ali Hassan, 45, who came to the UK from Somalia in 2006 and has been granted asylum.

"I've only been here for a year so I don't really have friends of different nationalities yet - but when our children go to school, the parents have meetings and discussions so there integration takes place," he said.

Peter Cercek, 33, a computer worker who arrived from the Czech Republic in 2004, highlights a position communities moving to less diverse areas may find themselves in.

"For the first six months I only knew people from my country, but now I have friends of all different nationalities," he said. "If I lived in a small town I probably wouldn't mix, but there are so many different people it's impossible not to."

Sheraz Ahmed, 26, who came to London from Pakistan just five months ago, is working part-time on a stand selling telephone cards and studying English, ahead of starting an MBA. Friends he has made through work are from Mauritius and Albania, but his housemates are also Pakistani and he says he does not really know any British people.

"It's difficult to mix with other cultures when I've only been here for a short while," he said. "But that's why it's important to speak English."

The comments of student Christopher Lewis, 16, suggest that promotion of a common language more than Britishness is the most effective way to integrate communities in 2007. The UK-born son of Greek immigrants said he was not entirely at ease with being described as British.

"I've friends from Latvia and Africa but at the end of the day families always have tradition. You can socialise but your roots are going to be closer to you than your outside contacts," he said. "Some parts of me are British and some parts are not. The UK is a multi-cultural society now - it is not 'just British' anymore."

BBC

Nazis told: go back to where you came from

Lo says extreme right BNP is wasting its time here

Ulster's only elected Chinese politician has slammed the extremist BNP's latest attempt at a recruitment drive in the province.

The right-wing party has published a new leaflet - entitled 'What now for Northern Ireland?' - claiming we are on our way to a "multi-cultural hellhole" and that our towns have become "dumping grounds" for migrants.

Alliance MLA Anna Lo is disgusted by the BNP's intolerant language and says the party is wasting its time in Northern Ireland "because people are not racist here".

The offensive leaflet states: "Don't let Northern Ireland become like the multi-cultural hellhole we see in Britain. You have the power to stop it. Join the British National Party."

Ms Lo, who came to prominence as spokesperson for the Chinese Welfare Association, described the language used in the leaflet as provocative and intolerant of ethnic minorities.

"There is an element of inciting hatred," she said. "There is no attraction in Northern Ireland for this type of politics and I would discourage this party from coming over here. We have always had good race relations in Northern Ireland, there may be the odd incident, but that does not represent the majority of people here."

The Ulster BNP claims that since terrorists laid down their arms, Ulster towns have become "dumping grounds for economic migrants, health tourists and bogus asylum seekers".

The BNP's beleaguered Ulster branch has attempted for years to secure a foothold in Northern Ireland, without success.

Last year the party's controversial leader Nick Griffin was cleared of stirring up racial hatred - a move that prompted chancellor Gordon Brown to consider changing Britain's race laws.

The Ulster branch's latest attempt to attract new members, as usual, rejects any notion that migrant workers are good for the economy.

"We are constantly told by the liberal media that, economic migrants/asylum seekers are good for our economy and that they make us more diverse," states the leaflet. "What they don't tell you are that, cheap foreign labour, drives down wages, puts a strain on local services, like health care and housing" (sic).

But the newly elected Ms Lo said: "It is widely recognised that ethnic minorities make a very significant contribution to our economy."

Belfast Telegraph

TUC threatens boycott action over BNP ad

The Wales TUC General Council is today being urged to end all advertising with the Evening Post in a row over this newspaper's publication of a BNP election advert.And individual trade unions are said to be considering advising members to cease buying the paper.

The moves follow publication of a BNP advertisement on May 1, ahead of the Welsh Assembly elections.

Wales TUC general secretary Felicity Williams says in a letter to the Evening Post: "Wales TUC is committed to the development of Wales as a thriving, multi-faith, multi-cultural society and condemns without reservation the promotion of any extremists who seek to divide our society by spreading fear and suspicion through misleading racist and/or religious propaganda."

Her executive committee is calling on the General Council to authorise a ban on further advertising. It is also seeking to remove the Evening Post from the list of publications receiving editorial articles prepared by Wales TUC. The General Council was set to meet today in Llandudno, where the Wales TUC annual conference is underway.

In her letter to the Evening Post, Ms Williams says: "Wales TUC-affiliated unions are also considering advising their members to boycott the publication until further notice and until assurances are given from South West Wales Media Ltd that advertising policies have been amended to prevent the abhorrent promotion of fascist groups in Wales."

Spencer Feeney, Editor-in-Chief of South West Wales Media, and editor of the Evening Post, said: "Trade unions enjoy the freedom to advise their members as they see fit. It is for the individuals concerned to decide if they want to be told which newspapers they can or cannot read.

"Obviously, if Wales TUC officials choose not to talk to journalists on Wales's largest-selling newspaper about issues that affect and are of interest to their members, it will deny those individuals the opportunity of having their point of view on these important topics publicised."

Dawna Stickler, advertisement director with the paper, said: "All submitted advertisements are considered for publication according to the codes of Advertising Practice as recommended by the Newspaper Society.

"The advertisement in question did not contravene these guidelines and, in fact, conformed to the principles of legal advertising. As such, there was no justifiable reason for this advertisement to be rejected."

This is South Wales

The dark reality lying behind the new-model BNP

Cambridge University law graduate, father-of-four, and small scale organic farmer whose home-grown meat is humanely produced... Meet Nick Griffin, the public face of the British National Party – sharp-suited, articulate, and politically ambitious. It’s an image that has been carefully honed to give the BNP mass appeal, which party officials hope to translate into electoral success.

In tomorrow’s local elections, his party has fielded more local candidates than ever before – six in Carlisle, and eleven across Cumbria. The effort being ploughed into the county by the BNP is evidence of what Griffin said in a previous election – that they see Cumbria as fertile territory in their battle to win political power.

But what lies behind the slick media-savvy image of the modern day BNP?

Is the party really a natural home for those who want to foster racial division? Does the party really want to bring an abrupt end to Cumbria’s transformation into a multicultural society, paving the way for an all-white United Kingdom?

At least part of the answer can be found in the glossy election leaflet being distributed by the party’s candidate for Carlisle’s Harraby ward, a self-employed joiner called David Fraser. Setting out his personal manifesto, he writes: “I’m Carlisle born and bred. On leaving school, I served my apprenticeship as a joiner and have been self-employed in my chosen trade ever since. I’m passionate about Cumbria and am very concerned about the job losses in the area. On top of this, we have now had an influx of cheap migrant labour undercutting the wages of the local workforce and putting even more pressure on the job market. Something must be done about this, which is why I have joined the BNP.”

In an interview during a previous election, Griffin told the News & Star: “Cumbria is one of those areas which is like England used to be, and most of the people living there want to keep it that way.”

To the many foreign workers now living in the county, working for companies such as McVitie’s, Fraser’s manifesto and Griffin’s words must be deeply disturbing. The News & Star spoke to several people who say they have good reason to fear the BNP and its values.

Justyana Zmuda, a 25-year-old Polish woman working in Carlisle for Riverside Recruitment, is appalled by the prospect of a Cumbria turning its back on foreigners. She is among hundreds of eastern European workers who have made a home for themselves here. Bubbly, happy, and relaxed, she came to the UK three years ago after completing a finance degree in Gdansk. She has an English boyfriend, and has progressed from a job as a barmaid to become Riverside Recruitment’s European welfare consultant, helping migrant workers to work in Cumbria.

She said: “This is a democracy and people can say whatever they want, but Cumbrian people are intelligent enough to know that foreign workers are not taking their jobs. Without them, the economy of Cumbria would not be so good. The reason there are so many Polish people in Carlisle is that they are good workers. We’re not taking jobs from anybody else. It doesn’t matter whether a worker is English or Polish – they’re paid the same.

“What difference does it make if your nurse in hospital is Polish or English? I’m going to college as well and so many of my friends are of different nationalities – from Japan, Germany, Ireland and Iran. They’re lovely people.”

Some local BNP opponents say the party has a long association with people fond of intimidation – a claim vehemently denied by BNP officials in the county.

Racist Derek Potts was last year jailed after he admitted pushing 36 offensive letters through the letterbox of the Bangladeshi family who run the Lazeez takeaway on Blackwell Road, Currock. Some of the papers he posted bore the BNP logo – though the party insists Potts has never been one of their members.

Speaking this week, the takeaway’s owner Asma Khatun, a married mother of three who came to the UK when she was three, said: “I’m scared of the BNP. But Carlisle is my home and I’m not going to let anybody make us leave.”

Though the BNP and the National Front are separate parties, she has bitter memories of the latter’s attempts to foster racial tension in Bradford during her childhood. She fears tense ethnic divisions could be the result if the BNP were to see a surge in its grassroots support.

Mrs Khatun, who runs the restaurant with her husband Liakoth Ali Khandoker, said: “I remember the National Front marching through the streets, shouting words like ‘Paki’ at us. Elderly people stayed in their homes. I was only eight but I remember being really scared. The letters pushed through our door were really threatening, telling us to watch our backs, going on about Islam and calling us terrorists. This is a free country – why can’t people be civilised?”

Also afraid of the BNP is would-be Labour councillor Johanthan Wood, an 18-year-old sixth former who is studying at Workington’s Sixth Form College. A candidate for Silloth in the Allerdale elections, he recently launched an anti-BNP leaflet campaign with his pal 19-year-old Duncan Money.

Both subsequently saw their names and pictures posted on the white nationalist website Redwatch, which goes under the slogan: “Remember places, traitors’ faces. They will pay for their crimes.”

Jonathan said: “We construed that as a threat. We’ve also had trouble from Combat 18, who take their name from the initials of Adolf Hitler, the first and eighth letters of the alphabet being his initials. We’ve had death threats from them over the phone and the internet.”

The threats came within weeks of Jonathan and Duncan launching their anti-BNP campaign, though the BNP again insists they have no knowledge of and would not sanction that kind of behaviour. They have no links with the two organisations involved, they say. Jonathan added: “It’s just encouraged me to bring these people out into the open.”

The BNP’s campaign organiser in Cumbria is Clive Jefferson, a 40-year-old Cumbrian father of two from Cockermouth in west Cumbria. He argues that the BNP has been tarnished by but not dominated by its past association with undesirables, many with criminal convictions. “The BNP is not the National Front,” he declared.

He said: “We’re good, genuine people. The BNP nationally, and locally says categorically that we don’t hate or dislike anybody. We’re not against anybody. We’re for British people. We ‘re a legal, democratic party. We want to listen to and represent people – the other parties have forgotten their grass roots.”

Asked if the party is racist, he insists it is not, but admits the BNP want to see and end to what he calls the “multi-cultural experiment” which he regards as a disaster. Mr Jefferson speaks of Britain as a country with porous borders, flooded with illegal migrants. He expressed contrition when confronted by the criminal background of Nick Griffin, convicted in 1998 of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. The offending material was his publication The Rune, which included anti-semitic material and even denied the Holocaust ever happened. He summed up the atrocity in a single word: “Holohoax”. He wrote: “I am well aware that orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into soap and lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria.”

Again, Mr Jefferson springs to his leader’s defence, with the words: “It was a horrible conviction, a nasty thing. I know Nick Griffin personally, and I trust him. He’s been convicted of having a different view of history. He’d been given evidence which questioned the magnitude of the Holocaust. But he does accept the Holocaust as a fact and understands the evidence he was presented with was not correct.”

He said his party had been targeted by a misleading leaflet linking his party to Derek Potts, who he said had simply got hold of BNP literature for his personal hate campaign against the restaurant owners.

“I apologise if that woman feels uncomfortable with our presence here,” he said.

Commenting on Jonathan Wood, he said: “There is nobody from the BNP threatening anyone and if there is I will discipline them. They will be removed from the BNP – it will not be tolerated.”

Mr Jefferson, a former electrical engineer, said he was inspired to join his party after a near fatal accident which showed him just how uncaring Britain has become. But his defence of the BNP cut little ice with Paul Jenkins, spokesman for the Cumbria Unite Against Fascism pressure group.

He said: “The BNP definitely pose a danger because in every single area where they are active, and where they have won council seats, racist attacks increase massively: we’ve seen that in Burnley in Lancashire, in parts of Yorkshire and in Barking in Dagenham. They tend to sneak in where there is a low turnout at elections. In terms of the wider dangers they represent, the important thing is what their leaflets do not tell you. Their aim is an all-white society. Nick Griffin said that in 2002. Their publicity officer Mark Collett claimed that Hitler’s Germany was a better place in which to live than some parts of Britain. That’s the real politics of the BNP.”

One man who has seen for himself what right wing extremism can lead to is Holocaust survivor Arek Hersh, a concentration camp survivor liberated by the Russians on January 8, 1945 and then evacuated to Cumbria. Now aged 78, Mr Hersh feels that it is his duty to speak of the horrors he saw as a child in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps.

He said: “I was eleven years old when I was taken from my home in Poland and put in the Otochono labour camp in the west of the country. I was there 18 months and out of the 2,500 people put in there, only eleven survived and I was one of them.”

In the months that followed, Mr Hersh was moved from one hellhole to another: from Otochno to Lodz ghetto, and then on to Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps. He was liberated by Russian soldiers after he and fellow survivors – starving, terrified, and skeletal – spent a month living in open cattle trucks sent to Czechoslovakia. Of the 120 people in his wagon, only 40 survived. Of the 3,000 who made that same journey, only 600 lived to see freedom.

Mr Hersh said: “It was absolutely horrendous. Nothing I can say could describe the horrors which these people perpetrated against us. People died every day – beaten, starved to death. The gas chambers and crematorium were working day and night. I can’t get it out of my head, and I had nightmares for 30 years. I lost my entire family, except for my sister Mania, who died 18 months ago. I lost my mother Bluma 39, my father Szmuel, 42, my sisters Itka, 18, and Dvora, seven, and my brother Tovia, 16. If you forget history, it repeats itself. It was 62 years ago, but it’s very important to remember what happened.I’ve witnessed things that nobody should ever have to see.”

News and Star