Today, London’s biggest ever anti-racism event was held in Victoria Park, 30 years after the original Rock Against Racism movement was started. Love Music Hate Racism attracted around 100,000 people in a musical celebration of diversity and a defiant stand against prejudice and discrimination. It is by coincidence that I make the following post but my timing couldn’t be better.
This week, like most other registered London voters, I received a booklet for the mayoral elections featuring each candidate’s campaign advert. The first advert in the booklet is for the British National Party candidate, Richard Barnbrook, and he begins by asking: “Remember London the way it used to be? Clean, friendly and safe.” I had to laugh when I read this; I mean, when was London ever, in its 2000-year history, clean and safe? However, while this is a ridiculous notion, racism in all its forms is not a subject to taken lightly.
The BNP remain, thankfully, a marginal, extremist party with only a relatively tiny proportion of voter support. It promotes ideas that are abhorrent to the vast majority of British citizens, and recent internal wrangling has hopefully damaged its party structure and campaigning abilities. But it is easy to fall into the rose-tinted nostalgic way of thinking that is preyed upon by their mayoral manifesto. Despite all the benefits of 21st century Western civilisation, we have probably all wondered at least fleetingly if maybe things used to better in some way.
The danger of an organisation like the BNP is that they play on these feelings while attacking failings of mainstream politics and even suggesting a surprising number of seemingly left-leaning, liberal and green policies (workers co-operatives, promotion of democratic participation, pollution charges etc.). They claim to know how to improve almost every aspect of our lives. Indeed, who wouldn’t want better housing, transport and healthcare, less crime and lower taxes? Even my British Asian housemate admitted to me that she found herself agreeing with some of the things they say.
Political parties by their very existence tend to hold that they have the answer to making the country better. But most parties want to provide all these things to all British citizens: everyone who was born here, everyone who has fulfilled the legal and social requirement to earn citizenship. The BNP wants to deny those rights to people based on where their parents and grandparents were born, what colour skin they have and what religion they follow, whilst “encouraging” them to leave the country. This is unequivocally wrong.
Most people reading this would never dream of voting for the far right, but there are people on the borderline who could be persuaded when the BNP’s case is presented without serious rebuttal. The BNP attempt to cover up their racial prejudice and discrimination with their own “utopian” social vision that draws on a number of ideas many would like to support (reduced immigration, tougher sentencing, promotion of British manufacturing etc.). They try to present a respectable, even tolerant face that justifies its position on supposed scientific and historical “facts”.
That’s why we shouldn’t laugh off the threat of the BNP and their ilk. Even though their arguments are ignorant, naïve and bigoted, without an opposition force to expose their flawed reasoning and questionable intentions, the BNP could gain sway with those who are attracted to the patriotic parts of their ideology and fail to see the true enormity of what the they stand for. The BNP’s influence has already crept into local politics and, if unchecked, has the potential to do so further. Hating racism isn’t enough. We have to take an active stand against it, even when it is difficult or awkward to do so. I’m ashamed to admit that I recently failed to pull someone up on using the word “coloured” and on making negative generalisations about other racial and national groups. Next time I hope I will have more courage. We must be vigilant in engaging in debate and opposing and countering racist thinking wherever it may rear its ugly head.
Posted by dontsmokeinbed 