I’ve just got back from doing a spot of shopping in my local town – and do you know what struck me? How white it was. Absolutely heaving with ghostfaces. In fact, in the hour or so that I spent there I don’t think I saw a single non-white person, apart from some young ladies leaving the local tanning salon who were the colour of a glass of Tango and that doesn’t really count.
It is OK to say this, incidentally, if you then use it as a basis to attack the town’s lack of diversity and demand the government ship a few ethnics in, regardless of whether or not they fancy the idea. It is not OK if you are expressing happiness in the fact that the town is all white – if, for example, I had written the words ‘Thank the living Lord Jesus Christ!’ after my second sentence. That would be bad and I’d lose my job and all hope of employment anywhere else, except perhaps as the person who takes the minutes at regional meetings of the Ku Klux Klan, or as the factotum who empties Katie Hopkins’s bed pan every morning.
A famous journo interviewer once came to my local town and wrote about how depressingly white it was and even asked me: ‘How can you live in a place like this?’ I replied with a sad shake of the head: ‘I don’t know, really. I just try to struggle by. Take each day as it comes. But it’s not easy. It’s really not easy.’ The article which eventually emerged was kindly enough and only hinted that because I chose to live in a town which was homogenous in its ethnic make-up I might be a white supremacist bastard, so no harm done. That is of course the view of all decent liberal people – that anyone who prefers to live somewhere which is overwhelmingly white must be a racist – and they see no irony in the fact that they themselves choose to live in Richmond or Wimbledon rather than Tower Hamlets.
If, however, you are not white and choose to live in an area that is almost exclusively not white, you are not a racist at all. Indeed you could not be further from being racist if you tried. Moreover, if a white person was to point out that an area was almost entirely not white, he (or she, or them, choose your pronouns etc) would be a racist simply for identifying that fact – for noticing.
This is the fate which befell Robert Jenrick this week, when the Guardian reported comments he had previously made after a visit to Birmingham. Earlier this year he had wandered into the Handsworth area, perhaps in the belief that the place was full of hard-working white-skinned navvies driving forward the industrial revolution, whereas in fact the bit he went to was reminiscent of the back streets of Karachi. He didn’t actually say that – he’d be in more trouble if he had – but merely noticed that he hadn’t seen a white face in an hour and a half. Who’dathunkit, huh?
These double standards serve only to infuriate the ordinary mass of people
Hell duly rained down upon him. He had been racist. Just for actually describing the ethnic make-up of an area. One of the politicians first to bleat out that ovine accusation was Richard Parker, the chairman of the go-getting, hugely successful, fiscally pristine West Midlands Combined Authority. Asked if he thought that Jenrick’s comments were racist, this political colossus replied: ‘I do. Because he’s set out intentionally to draw on a particular issue – people’s colour – to identify the point he wanted to make.’
I don’t know. Maybe Parker lost half of his brain cells while posing as a Bengal tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and has now only 11 left. But it is a ridiculous and odious observation to make. It would mean, for example, that if I described an area as being predominantly Bangladeshi, or German, or white British, I too would be racist. It is asinine.
And yet the baton was taken up with some avidity. On the BBC Newsnight programme, Victoria Derbyshire put on that slapped arse face she keeps in her handbag, resembling for all the world a minor People’s Judge in a People’s Court in Omsk in 1922 faced with a miscreant who had committed some ideological malfeasance. She looked cross and disgusted, as if someone had belched in the presence of Lenin.
Even before we get to the question of integration, or the lack of it, which was the point Jenrick intended to make, these double standards serve only to infuriate the ordinary mass of people. Especially the argument that Britons who are opposed to a huge influx of immigrants from diverse cultures being brought into their local town because it will change the character of the place are antediluvian racists for advancing such opposition – despite the fact that their fears usually turn out to be absolutely correct. But this is the means by which mass immigration has been foisted upon the indigenous people of the UK: one word of complaint, the slightest reservation expressed – racist! And so people become cowed and resentful and we store up trouble for the future. Incidentally, the refusal to acknowledge any potential problems associated with inward migration lay behind the failure, for more than a decade, to investigate the Muslim rape gang scandal (which is still going on, we are told).
It is a matter which is absolutely beyond dispute that people prefer to live among other people who have cultural backgrounds, habits and of course a language which is similar to their own. It’s why we have areas in our cities called ‘Little Italy’ and ‘Chinatown’. It’s why the Korean diaspora who came here homed in on New Malden. Many people prefer to live among their own – and that’s why integration is not quite the simple answer that Jenrick seems to think. It is a question of sheer numbers, and the indigenous population being enjoined to keep its collective gob shut and punished if it doesn’t.
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