14.04.2004

Why Trevor is far right

New Labour is in headlong retreat over racism. And people once associated with the left are providing the theoretical justification, warns Dave Osler

Just too damn genteel to stanley-knife an unaccompanied asylum-seeker on the way home from the kebab shop after kicking-out time? Why not use your broadsheet column to beat up on every immigrant in Britain all at once instead? Congratulations! You have met the liberal intellectual head-hunters.

New Labour is in headlong retreat over racism. And people once associated with the left are providing the theoretical justification. Imagine a broadcast on Radio Milles Collines - suitably laden with polite euphemism and read out in an awfully, awfully Balliol-boy accent, of course - and you get the picture.

So Prospect editor David Goodhart gets a two-page spread in The Guardian to agonise over his ‘progressive dilemma’ theory. Several thousand posh words are devoted to the neo-Powellite proposition that the working class is too thick to tolerate further immigration.

Next up is Trevor Phillips, a man who allied with the old Communist Party as a 70s student politician and supporter of black community self-defence against the National Front. These days he turns up in the Murdoch press, demanding the abandonment of multiculturalism. When leading black members of Britain’s ruling party start pandering to golf club prejudice, you just know things are getting bad out there in the mean, mean streets of London N1.

Phillips calls for the assertion of a “core of Britishness”, which he somehow seems to equate with Shakespeare. But what experiences will an alienated Asian youth in a bog-standard comprehensive in a high-unemployment northern town have in common with - and hey, let’s pluck an example totally at random here - a politically-connected former television executive currently pulling down a six-figure salary as the head of a race relations quango?

Then increasingly batty ex-feminist Melanie Phillips - no relation to the Commission for Racial Equality chief, presumably - steps in to “welcome” these arguments to her Daily Mail readership, even commending her namesake for being “brave”. To cap it all, former SDPer Polly Toynbee writes a supportive polemic titled ‘Why Trevor is right’. All on first name terms in this little circle. But shouldn’t that be ‘Why Trevor is far right’, Polly?

Meanwhile, cabinet ministers freely employ the sort of language that hasn’t emanated from mainstream politicians for almost three decades. David Blunkett speaks of Britain being “swamped” by people of a different culture. The last person to talk like that was Maggie Thatcher, when I was still a zit-covered teenage punk rocker spinning Buzzcocks 45s on my bedroom Dansette.

When the BBC catches trainee police officers dressing up in Ku Klux Klan gear and praising the killers of Stephen Lawrence, depend on Blunkett to home in on the real villain of the piece. That’s right - the reporter who did the story. And this bloke was once considered a municipal socialist.

But then, what else to expect from the party that subjects those asylum-seekers that manage to avoid Britain’s Konzentrationslager gulag to life on less-than-income-support benefit levels, all the time under the threat of seeing their kids trundled away if their application is finally rejected?

It’s not that most Labour Party members are actually racists, when it comes down to it. The problem is, the whole Third Way crew - not just Goodhart, Phillips, Phillips, Toynbee and Blunkett, but the likes of Peter Mandelson and Anthony Giddens as well - have been mesmerised by the rise of neo-fascism on mainland Europe.

They theorise that much of the far right’s electoral support comes from former core social democratic voters. Probably that is correct. Yet instead of trying to promote a left agenda that disarms discrimination by connecting with real working class concerns, they argue that Labour needs to head off neo-fascism at the pass by getting ‘tough on immigration’.

Sadly, there are two major flaws with this strategy. The first is, it doesn’t work. Nick Griffin will always make a more convincing racist than David Blunkett, no matter how hard Blunkett tries to goosestep. The second is, even if it did work, it is simply immoral.

Open borders is not just an academic demand. On June 11, the BNP will wake up celebrating their first batch of MEPs and dozens of councillors around the country. Respect may well lose all its deposits. And the English left will still be puzzling themselves over how it all happened.