Make Racism Wrong Again

REFORM UK's newly elected councillors include a man who called for migrants to be murdered at sea, a bona fide Holocaust denier and, in my own backyard, a bloke who backed the wholesale closure of mosques.

Not for decades has a major UK party, one possibly on course to form a government, allowed such virulent racism in its ranks.

Many argue that Reform's rapid rise - two years ago they won just two seats, yesterday some 1,500 - has been fuelled by opponents unwilling to get to grips with concerns about immigration. That a conspiracy of silence is breeding resentment.

In reality who amongst our movers and shakers isn't in almost constant dialogue about the need to curb arrivals?

Certainly not newspapers, who splash on the subject almost weekly. One study a few years ago ago found the Mail and Express alone had printed more than 300 anti-immigration front pages in just five years. Online meanwhile the bar for tech companies to remove offensive comments rises by the day.

Nor is it our traditional political parties, who have entered into an increasingly unedifying arms race to announce hardline border controls.

We are now in a place where a Labour Home Secretary has all but committed to making asylum status a temporary arrangement and dramatically increasing the timeframe for legal migrants to be granted leave to stay. When criticised for the policies recently, she lashed out at "white liberals" opposing the agenda.

The truth is that no administration for ages has dared show the vaguest disagreement with people who raise concerns. Because these are - we are often told - not just any concerns about immigration, they're legitimate concerns.

Remember when Gordon Brown was caught on a hot mic referring to Rochdale bigot Gillian Duffy as "a bigoted woman". A toe-curling interview in which the PM was confronted with his comments and a grovelling apology to the pensioner followed.

Now some would have it that Brown's comments typify the liberal sneers that have driven working class voters like Mrs Duffy into Reform's arms.

But is it not reasonable, dare I say legitimate, to question the pensioner's claims about "flocking East Europeans"? Was Brown perhaps right to suspect an underlying prejudice.

Guardian writer Milena Popova certainly thought so even at the time, querying if a similar apology would be extended to the group who had been unfavourably compared to marauding seabirds.

Alas any sort of reckoning over the Mrs Duffy debacle never materialised. Indeed when a Labour MP dared, some four years later, to suggest Brown probably had a point, he was swiftly saying sorry himself.

What we are never allowed to ask, it seems, is if the fears being articulated are proportionate or even justified.

Last year then Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds was asked to comment on public anxiety about asylum hotels - by then the focus of increasingly angry protests.

People were said to be upset - to coin a phrase - "for legitimate reasons".

The comments irked me, not least because the same minister had, in that same week, dismissed calls for a wealth tax as "daft". Not all grievances, it seems, are born equal.

But more importantly Reynolds had given a rather open endorsement of concerns around asylum hotels which, were you to glance at community Facebook groups, often prove to be demonstrable bollocks.

Whether it's the cost of the asylum system, the legitimacy of claims, or the number of crimes linked to claimants, the facts around this debate have been distorted beyond all recognition.

It should not be controversial to say "Actually mate contrary to claims from Sputnik1202 on Twitter, 'illegals' are not actually entitled to Michelin Star grub and a fumble with Kelly Brook." 

If there has been a failure to challenge the ignorance that informs this issue, more troubling is the unwillingness to interrogate the motives.

"What is divisive about wanting strong borders," failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin asked during yesterday's post-election post-mortem.

This is a pretty disingenous intervention from a man who has made it be known that to his mind Englishness is purely the reserve of white people. Ta-ra Marcus Rashford. Farewell Idris-bloody-Elba.

It's not an isolated dose of bile. Reform's first ever MP had previously been suspended from the Tories for sharing racist conspiracies about London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Robert Jenrick, now the party's finance spokesman, spoke about "Medieval attitudes" among certain communities - and he's not talking about the Byzantines here.

Perhaps most troubling was the frustration Sarah Pochin, the party's first by-election winner, expressed about the number of black and brown people in Cornflakes adverts. In a moment all talk about immigrants scrounging or failing to assimilate gave way to age-old hatred of people who just happen to look different.

Now we're often told that "X isn't racist". And by X I mean a placeholder letter for a given statement, not Elon Musk's website (which is definitely racist).

The trouble is that the umbrella over things that we simply must not consider prejudiced grows by the day.

And this has consequences in the real world, with the comments on news articles and social media becoming ever more bloodcurdling.

For me the danger of the moment was hammered home with the public reaction to a recent St George's Day event, during which a number of quite obviously far-right activists launched into racist chants.

When defenders of the parade were directed to video footage of agitators shouting "who the **** is Allah" some maintained the phrase couldn't be racist actually because Muslims are not a race...

This frenzy emboldens parties like Reform to go ever further in both rhetoric and policy. Farage at one time dismissed the idea of mass deportations, calling the notion "politically impossible". Within a year he was talking about removing 600,000 and made the placement of detention centres the tentpole of his election week efforts.

The current climate is leading to a crippling fear in calling out what at one time was deemed undeniable bigotry. Public statements which once saw Nick Griffin ostracised on Question Time are made without challenge in broadcast interview after broadcast interview.

The act of calling someone racist has arguably become more subversive than racism itself.

In a rare moment of moral clarity, Keir Starmer had branded race riots which spread through the country just weeks into his premiership "far right thuggery". Yet I saw plenty online condemn the Prime Minister for deploying divisive language. What concerned citizen hasn't lobbed a brick or two in the name of national pride?

As Reform has climbed to the top of the polls, there is an even more obvious chilling affect. The following summer was marked not by street violence but a proliferation of St George's flags flying from lamp posts.

Terrified of appearing hostile to outward displays of patriotism, the Labour frontbench botched its response by suggesting the flags looked quite nice actually. The PM himself owns a pair of Union Jack jim-jams, ministers might as well have intoned.

Perhaps inevitably the campaign emerged as a co-ordinated anti-immigration display. Raise the Colours, the Birmingham-based originators of the effort, make no secret of their agenda. Even as their website promises to unite communities there is a lengthy dossier, a little further down, on small boats. The association between our flag and a suspicion of foreigners is as open and obvious as it was when the National Front marched in the 70s.

Nor should we blinded to the fact that for many the anti-migration debate has gone far beyond reducing net numbers or even the Channel crossings - which at most amount to only five per cent of migration, despite the outsized coverage.

Everyone will have seen the online comments in which an increasing number of people back the old idea of remigration - that is to send back those already here. Or posts that go far beyond typical talking points of community cohesion and limited resource, into an unabashed dislike for people with different skin tones.

This is what Labour must now grasp. A small but growing number of people are disinterested in technocratic debates on visa rules, they want the country restored to 1950s demographics - and expect Reform to deliver that. 

How else can you explain a party bold enough to select and stand by candidates who called for P***s to be shot, or publicly backed Britain's most notorious far-right figure Tommy Robinson.

Some of the most obviously appalling members - the bloke who referred to white people as the master race for instance - still face suspensions. But many more remain and will be entering town halls across the country in coming weeks.

Ultimately it feels the experiment in allowing a more "robust" debate around immigration has acted less like a pressure valve than an accelerant.

Has plummeting migration levels drained the poison out of the issue? Has Labour's increasingly bellicose language on integration and entitlement taken the wind out of Farage's sails? On the contrary the tone of the discussion has only grown more aggressive.

Now some will argue that the boundaries of what it is acceptable have shifted irrevocably. That Reform's election success has legitimised views that were once extreme.

This feels like capitulation. The peddlers of hate have been relentless themselves in shouting down those who would confront them. There is an entire cottage industry of tabloid columns raging against the evils of wokery. The flag gangs pour abuse on anyone who  challenges their right to scale a lamp post. Where is the equivalent pushback against racist slurs we would have shuddered to hear just a few years ago?

It is time for local papers to ruthlessly remove hateful comments rife below the line, in much the same way that my old title chucked crude letters about  Anglo Saxon heritage in the bin. It is time that councils with half-sane administrations  properly enforce the Code of Conduct against elected members breaching it. No one who is openly hostile to a section of their own constituents is fit for public office. It's time for the flags to be ripped down, whatever the cries of protest.

Some will argue that such pushback will only help Farage and his fellow travellers further. Censorship! Cancellation! We know their favourite tunes. But I would argue that an extended period of allowing Reform and its poison to present itself as just another political project is a far greater risk.

For all his swagger, Farage leans heavily into the notion of his party being a mainstream successor to the Tories. There is why his deputy Richard Tice threatened legal action against early attempts to label Reform far-right. Or why recent accusations of schoolboy racism by Farage himself are dismissed as smears.

Old memories of skinheads still hold power and would no doubt cause unease among Reform's less militant voters. Forcing the party to pick between its most blatantly racist backers, who could easily drift to the even more extreme Restore, and a broader base could yet fracture the already diminishing vote share.

But this is more than just a matter of electoral mathematics, it feels essential to prevent a small but vocal minority unpicking the progress of half a century. If we were right to be repulsed by Nick Griffin's vision 20 years ago - and even Farage still recognises the toxicity of the BNP - it makes no sense to give the same vile impulses a veneer of respectability now. 

Racism is wrong. Reform is racist. And with the party perhaps on the precipice of power nationwide that is a legitimate concern.