In recent years the British public have been bombarded with allegations about our alleged bigotry. When we failed to follow the advice of the ‘Remain’ campaign in the EU referendum this ramped up several gears. Since then there has been a seemingly endless parade of pseudo-scientific claims that ‘hate crime has soared’ and the like. This has encouraged politicians and pundits to spend the last two years insisting that while the UK had long been a cauldron, it is now one whose lid is off and where racists are allowed to roam the land, attacking foreigners at will.
Some of us – certainly a majority – knew all this to be nonsense. Though the British public are no fonder of uncontrolled mass migration than any other country, we are significantly more tolerant, welcoming and accepting of immigrants and their descendants than any other country anyone can think of. Yet whenever anyone has objected to the defamation of the British people over recent years the response has always been the same. Rather than accept that the British public genuinely don’t recognise the caricature of themselves that has been invented in order to punish us, the accusation has lingered that anyone denying that we are a horrible racist country must be providing cover for all those horrible racists and is probably a horrible racist themselves.
On and on it has gone. Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times handed over its comment space to a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies to talk about (as the headline put it) ‘the British government’s racist heart.’ Recently the UN even sent a ‘special rapporteur on racism’ to the UK to do a fact-finding report. Of course sending a ‘special rapporteur on racism’ to a country like ours is akin to a judge putting on the black cap before a verdict has been reached.
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