Why the emphasis on colour?

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If you start out with the ‘right’ assumptions and definitions, then you can ‘prove’ absolutely anything, but that ‘proof’ is, at best, only ever going to be as accurate as those assumptions and definitions. Sadly, when it comes to reporting on ‘research’ papers, the point that the media often miss out is to tell us what those assumptions and definitions are. And when it comes to politicians, they far too frequently rely on the media reports rather than even bothering to read the original report, especially if the conclusions just happen to reflect their own biases and prejudices. It’s a phenomenon which we’ve seen often enough in relation to the economics of an independent Wales: whether it would be a basket-case or a land of milk and honey depends entirely on the, usually unreported, underlying assumptions.

Sometimes, it can lead those who jump onto conclusions without understanding the way they’ve been reached into effectively supporting ridiculous non sequiturs, and thus it was with Rupert Lowe last week. In a bizarre section of an interview with Nick Robinson, he found himself unable to confirm that the King of England is, in fact, a White Briton. Lowe had been using a curious report (produced by the failed Reform Ltd candidate against the victorious Green Party candidate in Gorton and Denton) in which he argued that ‘White Britons’ were destined to become a minority in the UK by 2063. But the definition of ‘White Briton’ used included a stipulation that both parents were born in the UK – a stipulation that the current monarch is unable to meet, his father having been born in Corfu. On that definition, it is very clear that Charles is not a White Briton, a conclusion which Lowe was strangely unwilling to admit.

For most of thus, such a patently absurd conclusion would be enough to cast considerable doubt on some of the report’s other assertions, let alone the definitions on which they are based. What, for instance, does it even mean to be ‘white’? The definition seems to be based on what people say when they fill in the census form, which makes it largely based on self-classification. Some might argue that asking what does ‘white’ mean is a silly question, because it’s ‘obvious’. But is it really – and how far do we need to go back?

But the bigger question is whether it matters. Lowe was seeking to present a sensational conclusion as though it is somehow civilisation-threatening, and clearly, to his intended audience, it might well appear to be so. But if the institution at the very summit of the UK state has been able to accept and absorb successive waves of foreign influence – whether Greek, German, Norman, or Dutch – without becoming less ‘British’ in the process (or maybe changing what 'British' itself means in the process), why should that be so hard for the rest of society? And why the emphasis on skin colour – why assume that a person of foreign descent who happens to look different is more of a threat than one who looks the same? There is a valid debate to be had around assimilation and cultural change, but physical appearance is an irrelevance. Except to racists and those who encourage them.

Judge them by thir actions, not their words

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The Home Secretary has announced that because people from certain countries who come to the UK as students are more likely than those from other countries to then apply for asylum, she will ban anyone from those countries coming to the UK on a student visa. She could just as easily – and just as truthfully – have said that students coming from a country where there is conflict are more likely to apply for asylum than those from countries where there is no conflict. Who’d have thought it? It’s almost as though people coming from places where they have genuine reasons to seek asylum might be more likely to seek asylum.

Treating people on the basis of being able to place them in a certain category rather than looking at them as individuals is always going to be problematic. I’m pretty certain that people with dark skin coming to the UK on student visas are more likely to apply for asylum than people with fair skin, although I’ll admit that I don’t have hard evidence to back that up, other than the entirely coincidental fact that it is true of all the countries she has selected. If the Home Secretary banned all those of a darker hue from applying for student visas, she would be more roundly condemned than she has been. Her announcement yesterday was not as overtly racist as that would be, even if the effect might end up indirectly discriminating on race. It is, though, much the same thing – treating people on the basis of a collective attribute rather than their individual circumstances.

It is essentially a lazy response to a complex issue. “Some of that group might apply for asylum, so we’ll ban all of them from studying here” might attract a positive headline from the right wing media, but it doesn’t reflect any sense of fairness or compassion. Insofar as I understand ‘traditional British values’, it’s also deeply un-British. But then again, I’ve long stopped trying to understand those values in terms of what people say they are – actions tell an entirely different story.

Farage is the consequence of limited ambition

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd seems rather pleased that so many people are referring to him as a racist based on the overt racism he allegedly displayed as a schoolboy half a century ago. His argument is that it increases the probability that racist voters (or, to use the term which he seems to prefer, “our core support”) will vote for his company in a future election. It should be no surprise either that overt expressions of racism or non-denial denials thereof would motivate racists to vote for a racist, nor that so many of those most likely to vote for Reform fall into that category. He might choose his words ever so slightly more carefully these days, but no-one who listens to what he says can be in much doubt about his distaste for foreigners, particularly those of a different hue or religion or who dare to speak a language other than English.

The question is about how to respond. If calling him out as a racist solidifies his core support, does that mean we should all cease calling out his racism? Part of the answer to that is that, outside what he calls his ‘core support’, there are many people who are not racist: contrary to what some seem to believe, voting for Farage doesn’t necessarily make someone a racist. There must be at least some in that category who will be deterred by a better understanding of the nature of what it is that they are planning to vote for. But more widely than that, failure to address expressions of racism tends to normalise those views, and that, in turn, shifts the mainstream of political discourse towards, rather than away from, Farageism.

In effect, normalising Farage’s political views is exactly what the leadership of Labour (to say nothing of the Tories) has been doing for some time. Building a tolerant society depends, ultimately, not on what politicians do or say, but on building a wider consensus in society. But building consensus around the type of society which we might wish to see is a project which politicians, and especially Labour ones, have long since abandoned in favour of building a coalition of voters, whatever their views, which is large enough to secure power. Providing politicians with careers who can then exercise the power of the state is a much narrower project, and will change little. That does, though, seem to be the limit of their ambition.

Backdating laws is a dangerous precedent to set

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It seems unlikely that Katie Lam, who is, apparently, a ‘rising star’ in the Conservative Party, gave even a millisecond’s thought to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland when she called for deportation on a scale which would restore a sufficient degree of ‘cultural coherence’ to the UK. It’s hard to interpret ‘cultural coherence’ as meaning anything other than ‘white, English-speaking’ though. It’s racist through and through, but then perhaps what gives her that rising star status is an ability to find new words to express racism without explicitly referring to race. It’s pretty clear that any minority which doesn’t fit her definition must be kept as small as possible, and can never be truly ‘British’, even if she really means English.

One aspect of what she had to say is particularly concerning, in her call for people who followed all the rules, and have been living in the UK entirely legally, to be deported on the grounds that the rules were wrong at the time. The immediate impact would be felt by large numbers of families which would be torn apart if one member were to be deported – unless, of course, she’s also planning to deport UK citizens who were born and raised here along with one or both of their parents. The secondary impact would be the loss of productive workers across a number of sectors of the UK economy, including in particular (although not limited to) health and care.

There is also a third implication of her proposed approach. If it were ever to be implemented, it would mean that none of us could any longer be certain that what we did legally 10, 20 or even 30 years ago is not retrospectively considered to be a criminal act. Changing immigration rules retrospectively might well appeal to those of a racist bent, but it’s a dangerous precedent to set. That it is official Tory policy to backdate rule changes by decades underlines just how far that party has moved from its traditional respect for the rule of law.

What is racism if not judging on skin colour?

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When I look at current leaders of the Tory Party, I don’t see a single white face. It’s a stupid, racist comment to make, of course. But is it really more racist than Jenrick’s comment that he didn’t see another white face on a visit to an area of Birmingham? How many people did he see, and in how big an area, over that fateful 90 minutes? Without such statistical context, it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about what it means for integration. How much bigger was his sample than the sample of one in the first sentence above? It’s worse than that, though. Suppose all the faces had been white, but they’d all been Poles or Romanians? How would he have known? And why would that have been more acceptable to him?

Both Jenrick and his party leader claim that his remarks weren’t racist, but leaping to a conclusion about the extent to which people are, or can be, ‘integrated’ into UK society (whatever that means – and other than dispersing them more widely geographically, it’s not at all clear that Jenrick knows what it means either) based purely on one visible characteristic, skin colour, is about as close to a textbook definition of racism as one can get. Maybe he really, genuinely isn’t a racist himself, but he knows that more than a few voters are, and he knows how to appeal to their prejudices.

By a curious coincidence (?), Handsworth, the part of Birmingham dishonoured by Jenrick’s presence, just happens to be next door to Smethwick, scene of an infamous electoral battle in 1964 which the Tories won on the basis of a campaign based on the number of non-white faces in the area. The Tory candidate that time round denied being racist too. It’s probably being excessively charitable to suggest that Jenrick might simply be too young to remember how well that worked for his party.

Starmer is avoiding honestly facing the problem of racism

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At the weekend, Starmer told us that he didn’t think Reform Ltd voters were racists, merely frustrated. It’s a sweeping statement to make. Although it’s entirely reasonable to suppose that some Reform Ltd voters are not racists, it doesn’t follow that none of them are. It also doesn’t address the converse: whilst it may well be true that voting for Farage’s lot doesn’t make someone a racist, it doesn’t follow at all that being racists doesn’t drive people to vote for Reform Ltd. Whilst it’s not an absolute, 100% causal link, it’s not a bad indicator. Racists have a strong tendency to think that Farage is expressing their views, and not without justification.

When asked directly whether Reform Ltd were trying to appeal to racists, Starmer’s response was a flat “No”, before proceeding to waffle about frustration and economic decline. Given that he’d already said that he thought that Reform Ltd policies were racist, this is a somewhat astonishing contradiction. What on earth is the point in promising outright racist policies if not to appeal to racists? His problem is that – just like Farage and Badenoch – he too is trying to appeal to racists. Not only to racists, of course; and maybe not so blatantly as Farage, but in a sense, that just makes it worse. Offering skimmed or semi-skimmed racism legitimises the full fat version, and can make voting for the real thing more acceptable.

Pretending that anger whipped up by the tabloids over migration is really just about the impact of economic decline and that people’s ‘concerns’ can be addressed by improving the NHS and putting more money in their pockets is wilfully turning a blind eye to the pernicious presence of racism. There is more racism, and even more latent racism, around than most of us would really like to acknowledge, even if racist voters don’t all choose to vote for Reform Ltd. It’s understandable that a PM tanking as badly in the polls as Starmer would be fearful of losing more votes to Farage, but aping his rhetoric in milder terms looks more like panic than a thought-through strategy. Whilst he might be more comfortable competing with other ‘right wing’ parties for the votes he’s losing in that direction, it seems as though he’s oblivious to those deserting Labour for the ‘left’, although there is evidence to suggest that he’d actually find it easier to get those back than those who’ve gone over to the Farageist dark side. It might be easier to pretend that it’s all about economics, but it isn’t honest.

"We're not racist, but..."

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One of the threads running through some reporting of the disorder in English towns and cities in recent days has been the strong denial by some of the participants that they are in any way racist or far-right in their views. Sometimes there’s a ‘but’ though, and in one case reported in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the ‘but’ was that in his town (Holyhead, for those who might be thinking Wales is somehow immune to what we have seen in England) “seven out of eight corner shops are owned by Muslims”. Now it is, of course, entirely possible that the person in question is an expert and well-schooled theologian, who has questioned all the shopkeepers concerned about their religious beliefs, and whose deep study of religious teachings has led him to the conclusion that buying his milk or newspapers from a Muslim is a serious threat to his own religion and culture which can only be countered by travelling to Liverpool to join an anti-Islam protest. It does seem rather more likely, however, that he has made a judgement about their religion from their appearance.

That does, though, leave unanswered the question of why anyone might see Muslims running shops as such a bad thing that it requires people to attack the most convenient mosque. Let us take it as read that at least some of those involved really do believe that there is nothing racist or right-wing about attacking anyone who happens to ‘look like’ a Muslim, along with their places of worship, their businesses, and places where they might be living, because to do so is actually defending Britishness, or what they assume Britishness to be, from the threat posed by ‘outsiders’. Where could such a belief possibly have come from? A major part of the answer to that question must surely turn around the way in which certain politicians have normalised terms like ‘invasion’ and ‘swamping’ in relation to migration. When the propositions that immigrants do not share ‘our’ values, and that immigration threatens ‘our’ way of life become part of mainstream political debate, why would anyone expect that those whose prejudices are thus validated would see such positions as being politically extreme? It would be unfair to accuse such politicians of egging on those participating in the violence, even if their ritualistic condemnations of it are invariably accompanied by a ’but’ of their own, in this case about failing to be sufficiently harsh with refugees. But not actively encouraging the riots doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t see the potential value to themselves in the ensuing disorder. There is, apparently, no evidence to support the widespread belief that Lenin coined the term ‘useful idiots’, but somebody did, and from the point of view of the far right the rioters fit the definition.

It isn’t only the rioters who are useful to the far right – immigrants also serve a similar function, albeit even less consciously. I’m not convinced that the far right themselves are always or necessarily racists. A belief that society should be run by authoritarians in the interests of the few does not in itself require the othering of any particular group. But ‘vote for me so that I can impose my will on you and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of myself and my friends’ isn’t exactly an election-winning slogan. Identifying and promoting conflict between groups in society, blaming some of those groups for the fact that others feel relatively poor or dispossessed, and then offering to resolve the situation in favour of one of those groups is a much more powerful way of achieving the same objective. Persecution of those who have been othered is more of a means to an end than an end in itself.

An authoritarian response to rioters looks and sounds like firm action, but also serves to strengthen the belief that authoritarianism provides solutions. Resolving the artificially induced conflicts is more about getting people to understand that the interests of the ‘useful idiots’ and the othered groups have more in common with each other than they do with the right wing authoritarians who are pulling the strings.

Living dangerously

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It was, apparently, Emo Philips, an American actor and comedian, who came up with the joke that, “When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.” But it is the English Conservative and Unionist Party which has decided to adopt a variation on this approach when it comes to dealing with racism and misogyny. Instead of trying to eliminate racist language by Tories, their response to the outrageous (and, to date, undenied) remarks attributed to their biggest donor has amounted to saying that a rich Tory donor can say whatever he likes as long as he apologises afterwards. And pays the party enough money. It all seems a bit reminiscent of medieval popes selling indulgences.

The linguistic acrobatics being performed by those who want to keep hold of the tainted £10 million are a wonder to behold. The miscreant himself claims that there was no racist or sexist intent in the words used as though the words ‘black’ and ‘women’ were meaningless and added nothing to what he said. Then there’s the claim that he can’t be racist because he does business in Jamaica. On that simplistic basis, neither were the slave owners; they were simply businessmen trying to turn a penny or two. The suggestion by number 10 that his words were wrong, but he’s given an apology for ‘being rude’ and we should all just move on sit oddly against a background where the government is determined to ‘crack down’ on anyone who breaks the Conservative consensus about what it is to be British. It invites us to consider that being racist is an entirely acceptable part of their definition of British values as long as an insincere apology is issued later by anyone whose words somehow leak into the public domain.

The reluctance to part with £10 million, especially after it’s already been spent, is, I suppose, understandable for a party obsessed with the financial value of everything, but principled it is not. Faced with the obvious car crash which was coming his way the moment the words leaked out, Sunak had two political options open to him. The first was immediate condemnation, accompanied by the return of the cash. Decisive, even if untypical, action would have wrong-footed the opposition, but the story (as a source of political damage to the Tories) would have gone away after a few days. Sunak seems incapable of instant reaction, so his default option was the second. That is to delay reacting as long as possible, and then try to brazen it out in the belief that the news media would move on. Consciously choosing the second option inevitably brings a third option into play, but it’s one that politicians only ever fall into by accident. Starting out by trying to brazen it out and then buckling under pressure is the worst of all in political terms: not only does it look weak, unprincipled, and indecisive, it also concedes that the original decision was wrong and the opponents were right all along. And it looks at least possible that pressure from his own side from people who have a genuine and entirely legitimate fear of being brought down along with him may yet push him that way. Living dangerously may be a lifestyle choice for some, but for Sunak it’s entirely accidental.

Stoking the tensions

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As most people from Wales or Scotland will understand, most of the rest of the world appears not to understand the difference between England and Britain. For all the difference in accent when people speak, we sound much the same as each other to a non-British ear. And there are no visible differences either – red hair may be marginally more prevalent in Ireland, but it isn’t uniquely so, and it’s not much of an indicator. Something similar happens in other areas of the world as well – or even within migrant communities. Whilst the difference between an Indian and a Pakistani or, say, someone of Indian ethnicity with a Mauritian/Kenyan background, will be clear and obvious to all of them, it’s a lot less so to many less familiar with the differences, and again is not obviously visible. Many of those stigmatised with the label ‘Paki’ over the years have no connection whatsoever with Pakistan; those doing the labelling simply don’t understand that.

That makes it highly dangerous for any politician in the UK to start labelling one particular group of people of Asian origin as being responsible for one particular type of crime. It would be dangerous even if it were true, but the evidence suggests that it doesn’t even pass that test. It’s a line which does, though, pander to a particular sector of the electorate, and it’s a sector which is unlikely to distinguish (and is probably incapable of doing so) between Pakistanis and Asians more generally. And to the extent that anything the Tories do or say these days can surprise me, I am surprised that Suella Braverman, given her own background, does not understand that. There seems to be a belief of some sort that there is nothing racist about a person of Asian origin stirring up hatred against other people of an Asian origin, but that’s not the way it’s likely to play out. It should go without saying that police will tackle grooming gangs, with no distinction as to their colour or race (although recent reports suggest that police are more, rather than less, likely to tackle non-Caucasian crime in at least some parts of the UK), and if some forces have ‘difficulty’ in doing that, it needs to be addressed. But using the sort of words which Braverman used yesterday is likely to make their task harder rather than easier, to say nothing of encouraging racist political groups. In her attempt to woo a particular sector of the electorate, she really has gone too far, and for all his cautious distancing from the detail of what she said, his failure to sack her means that Sunak is as bad. Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that having senior ministers from an Asian background would stoke rather than lessen racial tensions?

Playing to the audience

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The UK government’s report yesterday on racial discrimination deserved the panning that it got from all quarters. Whet it did not deserve, however, was the surprise which so many expressed at the suggestion that discrimination is more to do with the mindset of those discriminated against than the UK’s institutions. Victim-blaming is the standard approach of the current government – in their eyes, the poor are responsible for their own poverty and the sick are responsible for their own illnesses. Why wouldn’t they also blame minorities for being treated unequally?

It’s not deliberate; it’s the result of a mindset which truly believes that the rich are rich because they work hard and apply themselves, and the healthy are such because they look after themselves. It’s neither prejudice nor discrimination to assume that if ethnic minorities are being treated differently from white British people, then that too must be down to them. It’s an assumption that they can’t help making, and stand no chance of understanding why it’s wrong. If they were capable of understanding why it is wrong, we’d have a properly funded NHS, and a decent benefits system.

Of more concern than leopards putting on a display of their spots is the politics behind it. They don’t care what anybody with a different mindset thinks, because their attitude strikes a chord with their target supporters. When so many electors are happy to go along with blaming the poor for poverty, for instance – to say nothing of their attitudes towards people of a different ethnicity – playing to those prejudices is ‘good politics’ if your objective is unlimited power indefinitely. Saying what they know a substantial proportion of people want to hear hardens and strengthens those attitudes and bolsters their electoral support. And that is the real issue that should worry us: not that a hand-picked bunch of people who could be relied on to support the government’s position have done exactly the job with which they were tasked, but that the report will resonate with those who are already disposed to prejudice. Those who have leapt to criticise the report are missing the point – Johnson and his ilk don’t care what the critics think. They only care what their carefully selected section of the electorate thinks.

It all depends on where you are standing...

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I’m not a big fan of using words like ‘left’ ‘right’, ‘centre’ or ‘extreme’ to describe political positions; they’re far too often used as a term of abuse rather than a serious contribution to debate.  But setting aside my reluctance to use such terms for a moment, there can be few better examples of the way in which what is generally called the ‘centre’ has shifted than the statement last Friday by Sajid Javid praising Nigel Farage for not being an extremist, because he walked away from UKIP and called his former party a bunch of ‘thugs and extremists’.

Farage has never said anything to make one believe that he’s changed his mind about his previous use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, such as his statement that he’d feel uncomfortable if Romanians moved in next door, or that he feels awkward hearing people on a train speaking anything other than English, "because I don't understand them" (although why he feels it necessary to understand a conversation between strangers on a train was left unexplained).  It’s the sort of casual anti-foreigner sentiment which seems to come naturally to the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all behind the Brexit project, and Javid has effectively declared that he considers it normal and acceptable.

‘Extremist’ is not an easy term to define, because it’s a relative rather than an absolute term.  Whether someone is an extremist or not depends largely on where you are standing in relation to him or her.  In effect, the closer you are standing to someone, the less extreme that person will appear to be.  Javid’s claim that Farage is not an extremist tells us more about the position in which he and the Conservative Party find themselves than it does about Farage himself.

Is Johnson racism accusion justified?

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Earlier this week, there was a hoo-hah about the way in which the SNP’s Westminster leader called out Boris Johnson in the House of Commons for being dishonest and a racist.  Given Johnson’s history of lies and distortions, the ‘dishonest’ part is hard to argue with, but is he a racist?  By all accounts, his team when he was Mayor of London was very diverse, which suggests a degree of openness to other cultures and races which would be unusual for an out-and-out racist.  The accusation of racism was based on the words he has used in the past usually in his newspaper columns.  Those words certainly sound racist, but if there’s one thing we know for certain about Johnson it is that he doesn’t always (and perhaps even much less often than that) believe what he says and writes and that he is rarely consistent.  That is, after all, part of the basis on which the accusation of dishonesty is a fair one.

He certainly suffers from that casual sense of superiority which marks out people of his background and class, who ‘know’ they are better than others.  But it isn’t just brown people, black people, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh to which they feel superior, it is also the vast majority of those of their own race and nationality.  Johnson has never put it quite as bluntly as his mate Jacob, but I suspect that he basically agrees with Rees-Mogg’s suggestion that those of us educated in the state system – the overwhelming majority of the population – have the intellect of potted plants.  Such a belief in his own superiority might make a person unpleasant, and completely unsuitable for high office, but it doesn’t make him a racist.

I’m not convinced that Johnson is a racist as such; I think it’s far, far worse than that.  I believe that he is, rather, someone who is prepared to inflame and channel other people’s racism for his own ends, whether those be related to his ‘work’ as a columnist or his political ambitions.  I can’t believe that he doesn’t know or understand the appeal which his words might have for his target audience, and it’s not even a question of not caring about that – it’s the effect which he actively desires.  Not being a racist isn’t at all the same as not using other people’s racism to support his own ambitions.  Those who defend him by pointing to the diversity of his staff as Mayor are missing the point: what he thinks and does are irrelevant; what matters is what he wants a particular audience to think that he probably thinks.  Perhaps, just this once, words speak louder than actions.  In accusing him of racism, Ian Blackford is being far too soft on him.

The wrong reason for resigning.

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The Home Secretary has finally bowed to the inevitable and departed, although the real architect of the ‘hostile environment’ policy remains in Downing Street, for the time being at least.  It seems more likely at present that she will be brought down by bowing to another inevitable – accepting that the simplistic Brexit desired by her own party’s extremists is simply not a viable proposition.

It seems clear that the ‘hostile environment’ policy was discriminatory in its effect: it had more impact on those immigrants of a different skin colour.  I’m not convinced that that necessarily means that it was intended as a racist policy, or that those devising and implementing it were racist.  I think it’s actually worse than that – they were blind to the colour of those being deported because they were blind to their humanity.  Reducing them to numbers in a spreadsheet isn’t racially motivated, even if its effect turns out to be discriminatory.  Their real sin was that act of reducing people to numbers for the sake of pandering to an anti-immigrant culture in order to win votes.

In the same way, I’ve never been entirely convinced that the leading Brexiteers, who fought the referendum campaign largely on an anti-immigration platform, are actually either racist or xenophobic.  Again, it’s worse than that: they are people who were willing to leverage racism and xenophobia in others to achieve a result which they didn’t think they could bring about by honest argument and debate.

The common thread between the two is that element of dishonesty and the willingness to appease sentiments which they don’t share themselves.  In the process, rather than attempting to address the fears and concerns which many people clearly have about immigration, they have succeeded in reinforcing and legitimising even more extreme viewpoints.  That, rather than simply misleading parliament, whether intentionally or otherwise, is the real sin, but it’s one that they show no sign of even recognising.

Foot in mouth disease

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The British Labour Party seems to have scored two spectacular own goals in Scotland over the weekend, by despatching both its leader and the Mayor of London up to Perth to put the SNP in its place to address the Scottish branch conference.  As is often the case when British (or English – they’re much the same in this context) nationalists try to put down Scottish (or Welsh) independentistas, their remarks tell us more about them and their attitudes than about the subject matter of their words.

Corbyn merely managed to undermine completely his branch manager’s pitch for a rethink over the nature of the union between Scotland and England, and in the process probably destroy the only slim chance his party had of salvaging something in Scotland.  But that as almost as nothing compared to Khan’s success in equating Scottish nationalism with racism and hate, a comparison which all his subsequent ‘clarifications’ did nothing but confirm.  Between them, it was quite an achievement.

It isn’t only Saddiq Khan who sees Scottish nationalism as being about hatred and division, of course.  The idea that the whole idea is based first and foremost of a hatred of England and all things English is the standard assumption of most metropolitan commentators (and, when they can be bothered to think about Wales at all, they make the same lazy assumption).  I don’t think that it’s true (but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?), and I don’t see any good evidential basis for it.  That’s not to deny that there are some people who do display such an irrational hatred; of course there are – just as there are some people in England who display a similar irrational hatred of the Scots and Welsh.  But extrapolating from a few examples to the axiomatic assertion that the SNP’s whole rationale is based on such hatred is equally irrational.

Some of the people making this assumption are far from stupid – so why do they do it?  Clearly one reason is the very cynical one that painting people as racists and haters is a lot easier than engaging in adult debate about options and alternative futures.  And there’s quite a lot of evidence that playing to prejudices works as a political strategy, more’s the pity.  But I think that there are other factors as well, and I’ll touch on two.

The first is that very English sense of superiority and exceptionalism.  When you “know”, with no scintilla of doubt, that the “British” way of doing things is the very best and most successful in the whole wide world, it can be very difficult to understand why anyone would ever want to do anything different.  Clearly, anyone who does cannot be motivated by logic or reason, and must therefore be driven by emotion.  And the only emotion that can cause anyone to reject the ultimate perfection of Britishness must be hatred.  From a certain perspective, that is blindingly obvious.

The second is that their own nationalism (you know, the one that they always deny possessing, even when Corbyn is making his appeals to British patriotism) is inherently driven by a sense of superiority and difference.  As often as not, they subconsciously define themselves by what they are not, rather than by what they are.  And if their own variety of nationalism is driven by such factors, it is entirely reasonable for them to assume that any nationalism in Scotland is driven by the same factors.

And once they “know” that Scottish nationalism is driven by hatred of the English and an innate feeling of Scottish superiority, it’s easy to explain why they talk as they do.  The result, of course, is that the scope for debate with people who already know that anything you say is so motivated is so limited as to be worthless.  The only thing left to do is to ignore them and get on with the task of building the case from within.  There is, though, one other thing that independentistas could usefully do – and that’s stop referring to these people as possible allies in some sort of ‘progressive alliance’.  All that does is hinder the exposure of their real beliefs.

Froth and soundbites

Tweet I’m not sure that last week’s exchange of exposés of what two candidates in Ceredigion have written in the past tells us much more than (a) that politicians can be much too quick off the mark in responding to headlines and tweets without bothering to check the detail, and (b) that some of them don’t really care about the truth; they just know that mud sticks.  Personally, I think that there’s far too much concentration on all sides on views held or expressed in the past, when what really matters is what the individuals really think now.

The underlying issue, about racism in Wales, is a serious one, and simply exchanging insults doesn’t help to address that issue.  From personal experience, I can say that I have certainly met with racist views on the doorstep over the years.  I can remember one gentleman from the English Midlands, living in a rural village where most of the residents spoke daily a language which was incomprehensible to him, telling me that they’d moved there “…to be amongst our own people”.  Not exactly an outright expression of racism but the meaning was clear, even if the irony was completely lost on him.  And I’m certain that anyone who claims not to have encountered such an attitude on the doorstep in rural Wales has either not done very much canvassing or else not listened to what was being said.

What’s harder to judge is how typical it is, and the extent to which one can generalise.  Whilst it’s certainly true that for every individual who expresses a particular view there will be many more who hold the same view and just don’t express it so openly, it’s also true that some doorstep conversations make a deeper impression than others.  It’s all too easy to extrapolate from a few egregious examples and leap to a conclusion that a view is more common amongst a particular section of the population than is actually the case.

So, for the sake of balance, let me add that, over the years, I also met many English in-migrants who held a much more liberal view on race, and who made huge efforts to integrate with the local Welsh-speaking communities – and I met more than a few racist Welsh voters as well.  Racism is a problem; and in tackling it, it would be a good idea not to start with an assumption that it’s restricted to, or particularly prevalent in, any particular demographic.

In discussing the issue, then of course there’s a need to choose words carefully; but there’s something very wrong with political discussion which focuses more on the words chosen to discuss the issue than on the issue itself.  It’s symptomatic of a sound bite and froth attitude to politics; an approach which the way in which some politicians use social media seems only to reinforce.