The Generalissimo of Golf-Club reactionary bores has been in the news today. As I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, the Fuhrage has gone on record as telling Trevor Philips, the former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, that the current legislation preventing employers from discriminating on the grounds of race, should be repealed. Philips was interviewing him for a Channel 4 documentary to be shown next week, Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True. The Kipperfuhrer claimed that such legislation was no longer necessary, as Britain had moved past race.
The I also covered Farage’s remarks. It’s article reported him as saying
If we’d sat her 40 years ago, having this conversation, your point [on the need for laws preventing racial discrimination in the jobs market] would probably have been valid. I don’t think it is today.
If I did talk to my children about the question of race, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about.
The employer should be much freer to make decisions on who she or he employs. The situation that we now have, where an employer is not allowed to choose between a British-born person and somebody from Poland, is a ludicrous state of affairs. We have taken our relationship with Europe to a level that, frankly, has gone against common sense and certainly against self-interest.
He was also quoted as saying
I would argue that the law does need changing, and that if an employer wishes to choose, or you can use the word ‘discriminate’ if you want to, but wishes to choose to employ a British-born person, they should be allowed to do so. I think you should be able to choose on the basis of nationality, yes, I do.
When asked whether UKIP would retain the laws banning racial discrimination, he stated they wouldn’t, on the grounds that ‘We as a party are colour-blind’.
Say whaaaat? The Kippers have some of the most frothingly racist membership of any political party outside the openly Fascist parties like the BNP, NF, Britain First and the EDL. It seems that every week there’s yet another scandal in which one of their candidates or officials has been caught making racist, or otherwise offensive or bigoted comments. Like the female Kipper in Margate, who announced she couldn’t stand ‘negroes’, or ‘people with negroid features’. Or the laughing boys in the Kippers’ Bristol branch, who claimed they weren’t Fascists after they were caught were ‘liking’ comments by Britain First and the EDL on Facebook. Or the fact that Britain First have taken to protecting Kipper demonstrations in their armoured car. The list goes on.
Needless to say, anti-racism campaigners have been mightily unimpressed with Herr oberst’s claims. Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, who was also Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, stated
This is one of the most shocking things I have ever heard from a mainstream politician and demonstrates breath-taking ignorance. We have made huge progress in tackling racial inequality and discrimination in this country, partly because of Labour’s strong anti-discrimination laws, but things are still far from perfect.
The direct of the think tank, Britain Future, attacked the Fuhrage’s remarks as ‘quite a throwback’, saying ‘We can debate the content of anti-discrimination legislation, but there is a strong consensus that if you believe in equal opportunities then that means anti-discrimination legislation that gives everyone a fair chance.’
And that’s the point: Farage doesn’t want everyone to be given a fair chance. His party has attacked legislation going back to the Victorians protecting women, the working class and employees, giving them maternity leave, paid holidays and defending them from unfair dismissal.
The I in its report also comments that Farage’s claim conflicts with recent findings that 49 per cent of ethnic minorities have been unemployed for over two years due to the recession, a far higher proportion than White British.
Just this evening I reblogged a piece from The Young Turks show from American television, reporting the finding of the left-wing American magazine, Mother Jones, that Black Americans have been disproportionately affected by the recession, and that in economic downturns, White racism becomes more overt and acute. This is directly relevant to what’s happening over here. I even have Black friends, who’ve experienced the same kind of discrimination as that reported by the magazine of Black Americans.
And it isn’t just Blacks. Generally, British Muslims also suffer disproportionately from poor academic results and problems finding work. This isn’t just a problem for those, who did poorly at school. Even well-educated Muslims with degrees may find it harder than White graduates to find jobs. Economic problems are one of the factors behind Muslim disaffection in this country. It is not, by any means, the only factor. Nevertheless, its importance should not be discounted.
Farage is clearly lying about his party and its supposedly anti-racist stance. It appears to be another policy he’s copied from American Conservatives. The Repugs over the other side of the Atlantic have been trying to rewrite history in order to make the repeal of anti-racism legislation more acceptable. One notorious Canadian site, for example, pointed out that George Wallace, the notorious opponent of ending segregation, actually wasn’t personally racist. He was a member of NAACP, and de-segregated his department store before anyone else did. It’s just that as a supporter of property rights, he stood for the owner’s absolute right to dispose of his property and business exactly how he wished.
Similarly, Guy Debord’s Cat has blogged on the raft of Libertarian organisations and think tanks trying to rewrite the history of the American Civil War, so that it wasn’t about ending slavery, but about tariff reform.
The Fuhrage was a guest at CPAC last week, the big, hard-line Conservative conference in America, which features such devastating intellectuals like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. He’s also a friend and associate of Rand Paul and other notorious right-wingers, who stand for privatising everything that ain’t nailed down and squeezing the poor for every penny they don’t have.
It’s all part of the Repugs’ ‘Southern Strategy’. This was a deliberate attempt to appeal to White voters in the South, who feared competition from Blacks through affirmative action. And they weren’t subtle about. One party political broadcast by the Repugs under Reagan featured a White man opening a letter telling him that he hadn’t got the job, while the voiceover announced that ‘you’ didn’t get it, ‘even though you worked for it’, and that it had gone instead to a Black person through racial politics.
Now British anti-racist legislation makes that kind of explicit approach illegal. Nevertheless, the Tories have also been trying to appeal to ‘angry White men’. The Spectator back in 2004 declared that there was only one part of the population that wasn’t welcome on the streets of inner London, and that was White men. And just like the Tories of the Speccie, the Kippers are trying to appeal to the same electoral base.
It’s a pernicious, dangerous policy. Much of the anti-racism legislation Fuhrage complains about was put in place to prevent racial unrest, like the riots that broke out all over the country in 1981/2. These were fuelled by the acute poverty and racism experienced by the Black population. It’s designed to prevent the kind of racial fears and violence that Mosley stoked up and tried to capitalise on against the Jews in the East End in his campaign to become Britain’s Duce. This legislation hasn’t been entirely successful. It’s still very controversial, and it has worked to make many working class Whites feel left behind and unfairly discriminated against. But despite these problems, Britain’s a better place because of them.
And what the Fuhrage hasn’t mentioned, is that the same laws which protect Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities, also protect Whites. There have been cases where White British have successfully sued an employer because they were discriminated against because of their colour. The same legislation that protects ethnic minorities protects all of us.
But Farage isn’t interested in that. He just wants to appeal to the racist and prejudiced, in order to create a far more hierarchical, more racist, and more unjust society. And his smooth claims to be non-racist are simply falsehoods to disguise that.
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