Blair's Posturing

Published: 28/05/2007

Hating Foreigners
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
I have been touring the sweetest parts of old England performing my show, originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, now hosted by Tara Arts the inventive British Asian theatre company. Director Jatinder Verma founded Tara thirty years ago exactly after a young Asian man, Gurdip Singh Chagger was murdered in Southall in a National Front inspired attack. It was, says Verma when I once interviewed him: ’a watershed year which signalled the arrival of very angry and very active Asian youth, prepared to fight the racist ideologues’. Since then, some has changed for the better, much for the brutal worse. Racism is forbidden on Big Brother ( good) yet the hatred of ‘foreigners’ by the state and many of its perpetually disgruntled natives is now thought entirely understandable. Feeling the resentment is be truly British and should surely be in the citizenship test.

The NF was replaced by the well cut BNP now showing off a new best friend, Jewish immigrant, DTI Minister Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking. These designer fascists hug her for saying indigenous Britons must be given priority in social housing over needy migrants. They can get another famous endorsement from Michael Portillo also a child of immigrants, who also polishes up nice to reflect the basest values of which this nation is capable. Listen to him: ‘ Politicians admitted large numbers of foreigners because of post-colonial guilt and as a way of driving down wage rates.’ Nothing about soldiers from India, Africa and the Caribbean fighting in the war or the making of the welfare state which would have collapsed without migrants, nothing about his own family grabbing the good British life. Remember the Spitting Image Portillo figure with the blonde and pretty Aryan, Peter Lilley? I had forgotten it too.

Three decades after the Chagger murder, we have another lot of very angry, very active Asian youth, Muslim now. A small number have turned into cruel and anarchic brutes despised by their own for causing bloody mayhem. More are turning into sofa jihadis, offering tea and sympathy to the killers. The vast majority harbour legitimate grievances against their own community leaders and the country they were born into and of course about the killing fields in the Middle East. Blair has never understood nor diffused this sense of injustice, though I see Ruth Kelly’s department is now trying innovative policy responses to deal fairly with the disenchantment. The overstaying PM wants instead to use the tested collective punishment response. All Muslims are to be chastened, brought down to quivering vassalage. He promises new ‘wartime’ measures giving the police draconian powers to interrogate anyone brown at will about anything they wish. So all Asians can expect to be harassed as a condition of their residence. Refuse to cooperate and we could be fined up to £5000 or sent to prison. For our skin is now our birthmark of sin, our biological yellow star and we must all bow to the punishment it brings. Like hell we will.

As his power fades, so does much of Blair’s posturing as a man committed to progressive ideals. He never did want the Human Rights Act or the FoI laws either. So now he attacks judges and lawyers even more viciously than before for caring about terrorists and never their victims ( This lawyer, married to a human rights supremo patently longs for those days when Lord Denning happily incarcerated any Irishman for terrorist attacks, guilty or not.) Blair is dictatorial, he is an imperialist, he is indifferent to the deaths of Arabs and Muslims, he acts as if western lives are intrinsically more valuable than non-western lives, he is a liberal neo-Con -all that we do know. But now I also see him a British leader absolutely of our times, churning with fear about and revulsion towards the swarthy peoples in and outside his kingdom, except multi-millionaires when greed has to take precedence over mistrust.

A people’s Prince, Blair sells easily his authoritarianism and unjust laws. 10 Downing Street immediately flew in to support Margaret Hodge who obviously expected many bouquets for reflecting her master’s voice.

Only some bouquets were of thorny roses. Many in the New Labour hierarchy are no longer prepared to wave in Blairite, gut wrenching populism. They are now unafraid of the bossman and his creepy whips and spinners. You can smell the fresh breath of minty freedom after so long keeping their mouths shut and noisome. That they allowed themselves to be censored is despicable I told one favoured top table lady who confided in me that she really, really wanted to vote against the Iraq war but just couldn’t out of loyalty. And 700,000 died because there were so many such noble loyalists. Better late than never I guess. Respectable dissenters are queuing up. By far the most articulate has been Jon Cruddus, MP for Dagenham, next door to Hodge’s Barking. He knows the same constituent grumbles, but the facts too that rarely do incoming economic migrants leap to the top of housing lists. Harriet Harman, largely honourable when dealing with her immigrant constituents has also criticised Hodge as have Alan Johnson, Ken Livingstone and even stern Hazel Blear.

A colossal lie has been perpetuated by the rainbow coalition of anti-immigrants from left to right, that they are not ‘allowed’ to express their views. Really? On the BBC alone there are 544,000 mentions in 2007. What has been conspicuously absent is a defence of asylum seekers and migrants. Now we are starting a debate proper not merely acquiescing to the BNP on demand. Jack Dromey, ethical Trades Unionist, Nigel Harris the incomparable rationalist who argues for migration and think tanks like the IPPR, Compass and the RSA have all recently debated and campaigned against their opponents who want to build a wall round these isles.

People say I don’t care about the poor whites who have lost out in recent decades. I do, very much, and have sided with miners, the generationally poor, the classes kept down. It is Thatcher first and Blair next who sacrificed them- never replenished hard hit localities and banished them to the edges- not the immigrants they instinctively blame.

In Hexham and Kendall with the show, much of it about the life of an immigrant, the subject was dramatized with intensity and even the most resistant in the audience related to the truths of history. They saw how in Shakespeare’s day incomers were accused of bringing cheap labour and disease and now we are all suspected of importing deadly radicalism. It is time for good people in key positions to break the pernicious link between immigration and terrorism. I believe this latest burst of Blairite illiberal laws against Muslims will see the same kind of intelligent opposition that rose up against Hodge.

We can reverse the growing national discontent over new and old arrivals and make our country optimistic and safer. Or not. The window of possibilities opens up. Lets hope Brown doesn’t slap it shut.

Published in The Independent