The Racism Revival

Its funny how thing’s pan out. Who’d have though that the use of an old BNP slogan by our dear leader, would have blown up in his face the same week as the offspring of one of our former leaders used a racist phrase. Would you adam and eve it! This on the back of Harry Windsor’s use of the P-word, though I was more offended by various Royal a*se-lickers sorry, Correspondents continued use of the P word on television.

Firstly, British jobs for British workers and all that. When Brown, as I understand it, misquoted his own speech at the Labour conference in 2007, he must have known that the phrase would come back to bite him in the posterior. The finest politician of our age, according to our subservient press, using BNP slogans which UKIP would happily use, is such a crushing blow to Brown’s credibility.

What is surprising is how this has come back to the fore. Workers at the Linsey Oil Refinery walked out when sub sub contractors of the French Oil company Total brought in Spanish and Portuguese workers, over the heads of local workers. The local workers have reacted with dignity, resisting calls from the BNP, and correcting the media at every turn over what the dispute is about. This is in spite of the opposition from the government, with Peter Mandleson warning against protectionism, and as I have pointed out, a media keen to peddle the angle thatthis is about generic “British jobs”. Well surely IREM (the Italian company who’s contract stipulated that their own workers rather than local workers should be used) are propagating a king of protectionism. Pot… Kettle anyone.

Mandleson’s handling of the whole affair has been completely unsatisfactory, preferring to blame the workers for walking out than think about the bigger picture. This is something that no Labour politician should think about doing, especially at a time when New Labour are tanking in the polls. But then again, having spent the last 12 years shunning their former core constituency, what really do these workers expect. Brown, Mandleson and Blair should have been brought back to core Labour values a long time ago, rather than let them get to peddling BNP slogans.

Whether the BNP, or more pertinently UKIP gain some electorial dividend over this (and it is hard to think that they wouldn’t, the BNP are experts in the black art’s of spin), New Labour have scored a massive own goal by misrepresenting their own supporters.

This is something which Thatch wouldn’t have done, and the daughter of Thatch (left) stuck her size 8’s right in it this week. She is reported, backstage at the BBC’s “The One Show” (where she is a contributor), to have referred to a tennis player as a “gollywog”. If she referred to the tennis player I think that she did, not only was it racist, but mind-numbingly disrespectful of arguably one of the best Tennis players of this decade, and one of the leading sportswomen of this decade to boot.

One of the things that supporters of Thatcher seem to have missed is that workplaces up and down the country are duty-bound to be sensitive to their co-workers. Where I work, we have diversity training, which this kind of situation is not seen in a positive sight. The BBC, despite what some of their detractors say, has done the right thing.