Look at me!

It's probably quite a hard sell, pitching an article to a commissioning editor about how one particular social or cultural group is inherently inferior, in appearance, dress and manner to all the others, and that any suggestion that it is 'discriminatory' to state so clearly is inherently ridiculous. I imagine that it might have been easier in the 1950s - articles like 'The Irish, they're all really thick' or 'Those Jews, how tight can you get?' would probably have gone down a storm. Nowadays, not so much.

So kudos should go to Sathnam Sanghera, for getting his article on why all right-thinking people should despise 'posh people' past the editors.

You should not look at who people are but at what they are, the argument goes. If you prick a fattie, a yoof or a toff, do they not bleed? Bigotry is bigotry.

Except that it isn't. Not all isms are equally offensive. To compare racial prejudice, the repression of women, discrimination against the disabled, homophobia and ageism against the elderly to posh-ism, fattism or youth-ism is like comparing Princess Bea to Princess Leia...

In general, they [posh people] are arrogant, insular, chinless, clueless, have a troubling predilection for green wellies and velvet hairbands, bray and honk, have silly hyphenated names, and big teeth that they don't part enough when speaking.

I'd have to agree with Danny Finkelstein, who describes this as repulsive. And inaccurate. There's no reason to get particularly worked up about it all - the article is really only a 'look at me! Look at me! I'm dangerously transgressive!' piece after all - but pieces like this leave a rather disquieting note. Danny notes that, in Rwanda, the Hutus thought the Tutsis were, basically, privileged "poshos", with many of the characteristics Sathnam abhors in their British counterparts, and you could throw in the kulaks for good measure. Irrational hatred of entire ill-defined groups of people on the basis of nothing more than ignorant prejudice is a recipe for disaster. Whether the targets are called Vanya and Gregori, Esther and Ishmael or Arabella and Hugo doesn't really matter.

Enoch, Enoch, Enoch

So it was a stopped clock after all. Heffer returns to form in his article in today's Telegraph in which he declares that the time is ripe to reclaim the heritage of Enoch Powell, that Powell was definitely not a racist, and that the Tories were stupid to have sought Nigel Hastilow's resignation over his statement, however ambiguous, that 'Enoch was right'.

There are, in fact, elements of sense within the article - although I remain unconvinced that Powell did not foresee the likely outcome of his speech. Powell was certainly academically brilliant, becoming a Fellow of All Souls. That this is not necessarily a qualification for political genius is amply demonstrated by the other recent MP to have achieved such status - John Redwood. But what Heffer misses is that, if one seeks, as he purport to do, a debate on immigration that actually has an outcome, the worst thing, literally the very worst thing, that one can do is to say 'Enoch was right'. For Enoch Powell is no longer the Conservative/Ulster Unionist MP of the middle of the century. He is rather a shorthand for the entire racial politics of the 1950s, the 'If you want a nigger for a neighbour' times. Despite his intellect, despite his charisma, despite his undoubted prescience in the field of monetarist economics, the best thing we can do with Enoch Powell for now is to forget him.

Perhaps, in another twenty years or so, there will be scope for a good revisionist biography that points out where he was right, where he was wrong, and where he was deliberately provocative. That time has not come, and his very name makes debate on immigration impossible. If Heffer doesn't see that, he is of course at liberty to fulminate that 'Enoch was right' as long as he likes. Let him see what sort of debate that produces.

UPDATE: Racist or not, Powell appears to have been a rather challenging dinner companion.

Toxic Argument

Nigel Hastilow, who I suspect will now return to the obscurity from which he had threatened briefly to emerge, has learned a lesson the painful way. His crime, which has brought down opprobrium from all sides, was to say the following:

"When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. Many insist: 'Enoch Powell was right'. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically."

There are two problems with this. The first is that saying 'Enoch was right' is tailor made to re-ignite the charge that for Tories to discuss immigration at all is racist. There are those who will say that Powell didn't have a racist bone in his body - that his speech, heavy with Virgilian allusion, was an academic exercise in premonition. I never saw Powell speak, though my father who did is certain that Powell was certainly a racist. In honesty, that doesn't really matter. 'Enoch was right' is about the most pointlessly damaging thing a Conservative can say. It allows people like Peter Hain to claim that the 'racist underbelly' of the Conservative Party has been exposed, and it allows people to continue looking at immigration through the prism of racism and bigotry - just at a time when David Cameron has succeeded in shifting the analysis.

So it's politically stupid - though it ought to be remembered that Hastilow has form on this. It was he who said during the 2001 General Election, when a candidate for Birmingham Edgbaston, that the Conservatives were "a lost cause". The miracle here is that he got a chance to stuff it up all over again. But, and here I disagree with Iain Dale, it was also important that Hastilow should go. Because the last thing that the Tories need is a candidate with either desperately poor judgement or sub-Powellite views on race. Candidates who say 'Enoch was right' and 'we should stop rolling out the red carpet for immigrants' are either terminally politically stupid, or worse.

In Prison My Whole Life

Via the indefatigable Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, I hear of a new film, designed to tickle the bien pensant by confirming each of their delicious prejudices. It is centered on the 25 years spent in prison by Mumia Abu Jamal, the Black Panther convicted of the murder of policeman Daniel Faulkner in 1982. His original death sentence was overturned in 2001 and replaced with a sentence of life imprisonment, a federal decision currently under appeal by both the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Abu Jamal's lawyers.

It's been a cause celebre for decades now - there were very tatty old stickers up the Cowley Road calling 'Free Mumia' when I went up 10 years ago - but the evidence was pretty solid, and there has been nothing particularly infamous about the passage of justice: Faulkner was shot by a .38 bullet identical to the one remaining bullet in the gun held by Jamal - five had recently been fired. Jamal was caught at the scene, having already assaulted Faulkner and been shot by him. I'm not an expert in the legal minutiae of the trial, but the Birmingham Six this isn't. It's just a very convenient rallying cry for both racial activists and anti-death penalty acitivists - plus it's undeniably a catchy name.

So, a film excoriating the American justice system on the basis of this case might be said to be hanging its argument on a pretty flimsy hook. But then, look at the rest of the balls served up around it:

The film linked this abomination with Abu Ghraib, the execution of the Rosenbergs and the treatment of the Black Panthers in that land of the free. This is the ugly America, usually covered over with the stars and stripes. The Firths will be damned by patriotic Americans, including their fans. Like many other British "luvvies", so derided by the press – Juliet Stevenson, Emma Thompson, Ken Loach – they use their names for a greater good. There are such people in the USA, but today most have been silenced.

Jamal was a Black Panther, and, although Yasmin hasn't gone into specifics on what it was about their 'treatment' that so outrages her (I assume it wasn't the repealing of a law allowing the carrying of loaded shotguns and rifles in public) the fact that in 1967-1969, nine police officers were killed and nearly sixty wounded in altercations with the Panthers rather suggests that something needed to be done. As for the Rosenbergs, those pin-ups of the left for so long, they were guilty of passing nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. They were spies. Simple as that. And as for that last sentence, what a complete load of twaddle! This belief that some appear to have that all dissenting voices in America are being rounded up and 'silenced' is more than bizarre - it's demented.

Oddness from the Yazz-monster

Since the Independent used to hide its comment pieces behind a subscription wall, and I wasn't going to go out and buy the bloody thing, I had never read the articles of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown until recently. I rather think that should have remained my policy, as today's article is by equal measure baffling and irritating. There are bizarre non-sequitors:

There is still no genuine and uncontested equivalence between white Britons and those who are unfortunate enough not to be. Old forms of overt racism have been banished from the landscape; the main political parties have tacitly agreed a red line on racist statements by influential insiders; chosen black and Asian citizens now get to powerful positions; friendships and romances between us steadily weave a multicoloured social tapestry, strong and beautiful. New internal fissures and violent hatreds within black and Asian hearts and minds sometimes make white racism appear tame and polite.

Or in other words, there is no acceptable racism any more, but it's still a racist society. Is it just me or is that a rather pointless argument? Don't worry about the facts - just go with how you feel! There are odd statements:

I still say there is no genuine and uncontested parity between whites and non-whites, not here, not in Europe, not Australia, not in the US, not even in post-apartheid South Africa rejoicing today in their rugby win.

Not even in South Africa? South Africa is still a far more racially divided society than Europe, the UK, Australia or the US. There is still a clear social and economic division between white and black, while the political legal situation veers ever further towards positive discrimination. It's a bizarre thing to say. The whole article feels very flat - rather as if she was writing 800 words to a deadline with nothing new to say and no new ideas to examine. I preferred it when I couldn't read them to be honest.

CiF watch

Andrew Anthony's new book, The Fallout, was always going to cause a stir on the pages of Comment is Free, but the following line of attack, from a commenter called 'travblonski' was a new one on me.

You guys can never hide who you sympathize with or who benefits from your work. "You only had to look at the responses when some contributor dared to question the liberal-left shibboleths" Shibboleth - The term originates from the Hebrew word שבולת, which literally means "stream, torrent" There are not any English words that you can use to express yourself in the same way huh? Or Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, or Esperanto? That seems odd.

All of you guys have a problem. It is necesary for you to use buzzwords like holocaust or shibboleth to identify you to your betters as a loyal subject. But those buzzwords identify you to the rest of us as quislings.

There you have it. The use of the word shibboleth identifies you as a Jew. And we know what 'those guys' are up to.

Just what is it?

Further to my post of a few days ago, and Mr Eugenides' observation here, here's a comment, in its entirety, from a Comment is Free thread about whether Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone should be mayor of London.

Aside from George Galloway who is soon to retire Livingstone and Jenny Tonge is the only politician in the UK not in league with and propped up by the zionists (tellingly both he and Galloway work outside the 3 main parties).

To lose him to another zionist such as Boris Johnston would be the deathknell of a vibrant diverse democracry.

It's the combination of illiteracy, ignorance and spiteful racism that make it so identifiably a CiF comment. When I tried to register as a commenter I was rejected on the grounds that my chosen moniker (which I think was either partyreptile or Timj) was likely to inflame hatred. Words rather fail me.