Racism

Sunday

Douglas Murray

An ideological hatred

Two events this week have highlighted, from very different places, an identical problem. In Bulgaria on Wednesday a bomb was detonated on a tour bus carrying Israelis. Six people were killed and many more badly injured. On Friday a couple from Oldham, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shasta Khan, were sent to prison for attempting to put together an explosive device and planning to attack Jewish targets in Manchester. What links these two events across a continent? The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews. In the West many people continue to try to pretend that it is not about Jews at all, but about

Monday

Rod Liddle

Rio’s choc-ice

I shall be ringing the Crown Prosecution Service later today to insist that they bring a prosecution against the footballer Rio Ferdinand for having concurred with a tweeted suggestion that his colleague Ashley Cole was a ‘choc ice’. The term is deeply racist and offensive, given to mean that the person is black on the outside and white on the inside. Similar terms are, I believe, Oreo and coconut. Rio, perhaps realizing his transgression, has since insisted that he meant that Ashley was a ‘fake’; but I think we should let the courts decide that one, shouldn’t we? I can’t see any semantic link between choc ice and fake, unless

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Paul Simon and the shrill left

The opinion on Paul Simon’s famous Graceland album seems finally to have swung 180 degrees from where it once was. Simon recorded the music — which has just bee re-released — with black African performers (mostly) in South Africa in 1986 and was of course castigated by the authoritarian left for ‘breaking’ the cultural boycott against the apartheid state. I mean, really castigated; placed in the same rrrraaaaaccccissssst category as those cricketers who played games against South Africa’s white-only cricket team. Now, however, it seems to be accepted that it was a wise and even liberating decision from the singer, and has done much to bring African music to a

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Sunday

David Blackburn

The politics of sport

Football dominates the newspapers this morning, with England due to begin their European Championship campaign tomorrow. But the issue of racism in Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Poland, is a major feature of the coverage, with some commentators suggesting that players should refuse to play if their teammates are subjected to abuse. Ruud Gullit, of sexy football fame, is the latest retired star to back unilateral walk-offs.  UEFA, the European football governing body, has already said that its on-pitch officials will book any player who leaves the field, which has outraged numerous players, including the frenetic Manchester City and Italy striker Mario Balotelli. I imagine that lawyers will also

Monday

Rod Liddle

A few Easter questions

Apologies for my absence from this area: I took my two boys away for an uplifting week of cycling on a windswept and pretty Dutch island. I suppose they might have burned off a few more calories if I’d let them loose in the Rossebuurt for a few hours, but I’m getting respectable and middle class in old age. We flew back into Southend Airport, which was was an absolute joy: four minutes from disembarking we were out of the airport building. This may be the best use yet that anyone has thought of for Essex. A few questions about puzzling news stories which occurred whilst I was away: 1.)

Friday

Fraser Nelson

It’s poverty, not race, that ought to concern us more

My Daily Telegraph column today is about how poverty is a greater problem in Britain than racism, which I describe as an ‘almost-vanquished evil’. This has drawn some criticism, not least from those asking (understandably) what a white guy like me can know about racism. Not much, but plenty of academics have done a hell of a lot of work into racism in Britain (including two brilliant, young academics, Matt Goodwin and Robert Ford). And their studies present a far brighter picture than we’re used to. The abject failure of the BNP is not just down to Nick Griffin being a plumb — it’s because he tried to hawk a

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: ‘Britain is no longer racist’

In Brixton this morning, Nick Clegg delivered a speech on race equality. He said ‘There is another front in the war on race inequality that is too often neglected: economic opportunity… It simply cannot be right that that we still live in a society where, if you are from an ethnic minority, you face unfair hurdles when you strive for success.’ As a counterpoint to the Deputy Prime Minister’s remarks, here is Samir Shah’s Spectator cover piece from 2009: Race is not an issue in the UK anymore, Samir Shah, 7 October 2009 I first arrived in this country from Bombay in January 1960. Harold Macmillan had yet to make his Winds

Monday

Rod Liddle

Miliband admits immigrant workers in pole position

So, like squeezing blood from a stone, Labour has at last admitted that unconstrained immigration from what was once called Eastern Europe made life a lot harder for many British people. Ed Miliband said the following: “What I think people were worried about, in relation to Polish immigration in particular, was that they were seeing their wages, their living standards driven down. Part of the job of government is if you are going to have an open economy within Europe you have got to give that protection to employees so that they don’t see workers coming in and undercutting them.” Of course, one of the things you are not supposed

Saturday

Rod Liddle

What is the racial composition of a hobbit?

What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you know — white. Nearly white, maybe, but not quite. Proper white people, I thought, are taller than hobbits, less hysterical and tend not to live underground. But this was back in the days before I had heard of John Bercow. Also, proper white people had electricity, cars and supermarkets. One’s views change markedly over the