Some time in the early 1980s I was sitting in a taxi with Peter Utley, then deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, talking about the next election and the prospect that Margaret Thatcher might lose it. “That’s all right” said the biographer of Enoch Powell. “If it ever looks dangerous, all she has to do is to make a speech linking immigration with unemployment.”
This was a man who would have protested that he sincerely loathed fascism. He would never have dreamt of voting for the fascist British National Party. But he took for granted that the deep instincts of the British working class were xenophobic.
Last week the chairman of the BNP was acquitted by a jury in Yorkshire on charges of incitement to racial hatred, after he called Islam a “vicious, wicked faith”; compared asylum seekers to cockroaches, and said that “decent working people in West Yorkshire … are facing terrible problems, including the grooming of their children by racist paedophiles from part of the Muslim community.”
If this is not speech calculated to stir up racial hatred — and Mr Griffin, a Cambridge graduate, is no stranger to calculation — I can’t imagine what is. There’s no question that he said these things. They were all caught on tape. So the refusal of a jury to convict him suggests that such hatred is widespread in some parts of the country, and that the legislation to control it has stopped working.
The traditional left response to the BNP was to get out on the streets and fight them. The traditional response of the Right was to appropriate enough of their language to get their votes, while excluding them from any real power. This morning, in the Independent, the Conservative commentator Bruce Anderson writes “A lot of soggy liberals now believe that if no one talked about the problem it would just go away. Every day, people who used to think like that arrive, at last, in cancer specialists’ waiting rooms. In Christian -Muslim relations, such delay could be equally fatal”
Anderson is not just a thoroughly unpleasant1 man whose hiring by the Independent was a great stroke: there is no one better calculated to upset Liberal prejudices. He is also gifted with an organ whose workings modern science cannot explain — a nose uniquely adapted to fit between the haemorrhoids of each and every leader of the Conservative party. No matter who may have the job this year, Anderson’s ability to discern and praise his merits is matched only by the mercilessly clear-sighted anatomisation of all his predecessor’s faults and follies.
If such a man is starting to compare British Muslims to a cancer, we can be sure that a large proportion of the Conservative party feels that way; and if the BNP does well in the next election, and Cameron does badly, we will be in for interestingly unpleasant times.
1 My only clear memory of him comes from about the time of the conversation with Peter Utley. Anderson was in the Duke of York, the pub opposite the Spectator, though he was then a television producer. In the course of a discussion about Iran, he suggested infecting a flock of sheep with Aids and driving it over the border from some neighbouring country, in order to spread the disease. This was of course meant as a joke, though not a particularly funny one. The point was really to express his utter contempt for the people he was discussing.
Not the least depressing aspect is that he assumes – and very possibly correctly – that the word “liberal” now only means “left of Bush et al”.