Racism

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