Last month Mark Reckless won his seat in Rochester and Strood for UKIP. He did this despite the fact that he had appeared to endorse a program of repatriation for immigrants, aligning his views on immigration closer to the BNP and EDL than the official stance of Nigel’s yellow and purple army. In the storm surrounding the Emily Thornberry tweet not even the most left-wing sections of the mainstream press made very much of this. We’re often told that the liberal media and its social justice outrage machine are trigger-happy with accusations of racism – so how did this one slip through the net?
In the past, when the loony left ruled the UK with its tyrannical iron fist, politicians who spoke out against immigration were routinely accused of meddling in the dangerous art of dog whistle politics.
The establishment (elite, in their ivory towers, obviously) had decreed that racism would have no place in politics, and the two main political parties, like UKIP today, became keener than ever to distance themselves from the racist outbursts of their own members. From then on, those who wished to see their racist opinions made into policy would no longer have a mainstream party to vote for. But we knew that the UK still had its fair share of racism, and so the assumption went that any politician who stood on an anti-immigration platform was actually trying to tap into this dark-matter voting block of disenfranchised bigots.
Of course, that’s all ancient history now.
The Government and the Opposition have done everything they can to prevent an open debate on immigration, as indeed they do over our membership of the European Union. Ukip is the only party to have made it a talking point.
Meanwhile the political class and Left Wing media stumble around for a position trying to disguise the fact they are trying to close the gate after the horse has bolted by calling everyone who wants proper debate on immigration “a racist”.
– Nigel Farage, Daily Express, 10 January 2014*
It’s not prejudiced to be concerned about immigration.
– Ed Milliband, 27 May 2014*
Just because immigration is deeply controversial, that cannot mean that we should avoid talking about it.
– David Blunkett, Daily Mail, 27 October 2014*
In the UK, 30% of people will admit to being racist (BSA). In a poll released yesterday, we saw that 46% think EU immigration into Britain is bad for the country. A further 30% think that we should limit immigration even if that means breaking EU rules (YouGov). It’s also worth remembering that British people are wrong about nearly everything, especially the actual facts about the political issues they claim to be most concerned with, the foremost being immigration.
We don’t have any hard evidence to suggest that the 16% of voters who intend to vote for UKIP in the next election are part of the 30% who admit to being racist. We can’t say for sure that these are the same 30% who would be willing to break the law in order to stop EU citizens living and working here. You can use your own judgement to decide what that Venn diagram would look like if it actually existed.
And if we’re honest, we need to admit that nearly everybody is at least a little bit racist, partly because we internalise the prejudices from our culture, and partly for the same atavistic reason some pet dogs owned by white families will bark at passing black neighbours. But we know this. We all know that the catalogue of human frailty includes tribalism. We know also that many British people are overt, unreformed racists. We can’t escape the conclusion that racism remains a significant aspect of the British psyche, but somehow, we pretend that we can’t see the connection with the immigration debate.
For the record, this is not an accusation that Nigel Farage is himself a racist – I have no evidence for that beyond rumours and hearsay. Neither am I accusing all UKIP supporters of being racists. I am accusing Farage of cynically exploiting the festering racism in this country to empower himself and his cronies, and I am accusing UKIP of being structurally racist, and likely significantly more so than the wider British society to which it belongs.
When a third of the country are willing to admit to racial prejudice, it is incredibly disingenuous to welcome the debate on immigration and not admit that racism will be a factor. Maybe it is possible to disentangle our prejudices enough to have an objective, disinterested debate, but that’s never going to happen if we’re unwilling even to admit our biases.
The effect of this pretence will be tantamount to that other, unspoken alternative: restoring the validity of racist opinion in politics and public life.
Ultimately, the beneficiaries of this conspiracy of silence are the racists who would gladly use the machinery of politics to enact their own ideals of cultural purity, and who find that after years in the wilderness, they have their interests represented in mainstream politics. The dog whistle is being heard loud and clear.
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