THE WRONG SORT OF TORY

Laban Tall, whose blog I enjoy reading - disagrees with my post about Ann Winterton, the Tory MP who seems strangely prone to making racist remarks. (There's slightly more detail in this BBC report. I haven't been able to find the article she wrote for her local paper.)

LT writes:

Be fair. There isn't a great deal of control of immigration, and some people who arrive are criminals (10% of the UK prison population are foreign nationals, according to the BBC.)

Whether she's right to be 'thankful' that Britain is predominately white is debatable - but would you consider a Kenyan pleased that his country was black, or a Jordanian proud of his Arab nation, to be loathsome ?

Sorry, but that doesn't let her off the hook. I know it's easy for off-the-cuff remarks (which Wintertons's weren't, as far as I can tell) to be misconstrued - look at the fuss over William Bennett's musings on race and abortion. I'd be willing to give Winterton the benefit of the doubt if it weren't for the fact that she has form on this particular subject. Those earlier jokes about Pakistanis and Chinese cockle-pickers tell you an awful lot about her mind-set. Some rabble-rousers try to protect themselves by talking in code; this honorable member doesn't even make the effort. As for the "thankfully" line, there's a difference between patriotism and being disdainful towards minorities, and she quite deliberately crossed it. No, there's nothing wrong with a Kenyan politician being proud of his heritage. But if he espouses "African-ness" as a way of discriminating against, say, Indians - as happened in the Sixties - then he is a racial demagogue. My wife's family were forced to leave Kenya by the local equivalent of Ann Winterton. If the Tory party is serious about modernisation, then I don't see how there can be any room for people like her.

Comments

[Robert Sharp]

This is an interesting lesson for those of us who seek promote ideas of multiculturalism, and are supportive of immigration. If we want to condemn Anne Winterton's ideas, then I think we do indeed have to condemn a Kenyan's pride in "black" or a Jordanian's pride in "Arab".

But the idea which I hope is under attack, is the notion that a state can ever have the spiritual or ethnic attributes we apply to individuals. Calling a country "white" or "black" is certainly not referring to a country's soil, trees, or borders... so seems to be inherently racist to those individuals with the minority complexion. Likewise, calling a country Christian, Islamic or Jewish would fall into similar discriminatory problems.

The concepts of National Identity, and just plain individual identity, are often spoken of in the same breath. We would do well to remember they are totally incomparable.