‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the same silent prayer to the heavens.
The place was Topsham, a village on the river Exe, a few miles outside Exeter, where our mother had just moved in with a lovely chap named Frank. Trevor was the local celebrity, the carnival guest of honour and also the Only Black Man In The Village.
None of us had really thought of Trevor as being black before. (Well he isn’t really, is he? He’s like one of those cricket-playing Old Etonian maharajah types or those plummy-voiced African princes: whiter than any white person you’ve ever met.) But in Devon, the amiable, poetry-loving newsreader’s Trinidadian hues stuck out — or so it seemed in our paranoid imaginations — like a cobra at a mongoose wedding.
Sir Trevor McDonald went on to spend many happy years enjoying his weekend bolthole in Topsham and recently described it as his ‘favourite place in Britain’. So I can’t imagine the local Klan activity was quite as bad as we’d feared. The mistake we Delingpoles had made — and it’s a mistake lots of people make when they’ve lived too long in our sophisticated, bien-pensant, multicultural cities — was to confuse dominant whiteness with pernicious racism.
The actress Emma Thompson made the same mistake just the other day when she declared that Exeter was a place BNP leader Nick Griffin would ‘feel very comfortable’ because it had so few black faces. Thompson’s adopted son — a former Rwandan child-soldier called Tindyebwa Agaba, aka Tindy — had recently studied politics at the university and had had a ‘rough time’ as a result of racist taunts, once from some ‘nerds’ and another time from ‘three or four tattooed and macho-looking bouncers’ outside a nightclub. (Small beer, one presumes, compared with, say, Hutu mobs carving open pregnant mothers with their pangas and hurling the foetuses against trees, but still…) So Thompson had gone down to Exeter to tutor the locals in the ways of Islington-style righteousness.
‘What can we do to change the whiteness of Devon and Cornwall? How can we expand our university?’ one student asked at a lecture Thompson gave called All Africans Now. Thompson replied: ‘This is how we’re doing it. Tindy had his experience and now we’re having a big week of educational events to try to help it.’
Note that what Thompson didn’t do here was question the premise. As all white liberals would, she took it as a given that there’s nothing that would improve hideously white counties like Devon and Cornwall quite so much as a healthy influx of splendidly multihued, culturally vibrant ethnic types. And it’s not just liberals who think this way. The other day, I was standing next to a reasonably conservative female friend of mine, watching her son playing football in Oxfordshire among a sea of heads so uniformly blond I might have been witnessing Himmler’s favourite Aryan fantasy. ‘Gosh, you’ve got an amazingly broad cultural mix here. A real melting pot!’ I said. ‘Oh do we?’ she said, distractedly, not quite picking up on the sarcasm. ‘Good!’
Now I don’t think Emma Thompson is especially evil. And my Oxfordshire mum friend definitely isn’t. Yet the viewpoint they were both articulating — in their semi-conscious or completely unconscious ways — represents one of the most perniciously wrong, dangerous, destructive and pig-ignorantly fatuous pieces of unutterable stupidity in the entire history of Western non-thought: the idea that cultural whiteness is in and of itself a problem in need of a remedy.
As a nation we are in almost complete denial about this. You can tell from the surprisingly muted response to Neathergate. This was the claim a month ago by New-Labour apparatchik Andrew Neather — formerly adviser to Tony Blair, David Blunkett and Jack Straw — that the government’s open-door immigration policy was not, as we all previously thought, the result of incompetence and naivety but of a quite deliberate attempt to ‘enrich’ Britain through multiculturalism and to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’.
Either Neather is a liar, in which case he should have been exposed as such by now. Or he is telling the truth, in which case I am mildly disappointed that baying mobs have not yet taken to the streets and lynched every single ex- or serving member of the Labour government from 1997 onwards. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of truly awful things the Blair and Brown administrations have done to bugger up Britain. But this one is the most poisonous by a country mile.
Why is it so bad? Well, I wonder. Is it that some people are embarrassed to express their disgust and rage for fear of seeming racist? If so, allow me to wade in and do the job for them, for I’m not ashamed to point out the bleeding obvious one tiny bit.
First let me draw an analogy with a trip my wife and I paid to Djibouti a couple of years back. One of our treats was to drive and drive and drive into the middle of nowhere until we’d reached an Afar village sufficiently remote to have remained (relatively) untainted by Western civilisation.
As we looked at these subsistence-level natives with their brightly coloured garments, their rudimentary ari tent houses and their flocks of manky sheep, did we go: ‘What this lot need is a decent influx of white people to give the village more of a melting-pot vibe and broaden their narrow social outlook?’ Funnily enough, no. In the liberal weltanschauung, only being ‘too white’ is a crime; never too black, too Asian, too gay.
Second, allow me to give some examples of a few things rubbishy white people have managed to achieve without the benefit of that broad ethnic mix so earnestly desired by liberals: the Goldberg Variations; Citizen Kane; penicillin; the theory of gravity; helicopters; the internet; habeas corpus; Magna Carta; every other important concept in Greek or Latin; the Acropolis; the Renaissance; the complete works of Shakespeare, Molière and Goethe; the abolition of slavery… Enough, one might have hoped, for poor, useless Whitey not to feel too overwhelmingly ashamed of his Caucasian heritage.
Apparently not though. A predominately white, Anglo-Saxon, quintessentially English city like Exeter can only count itself truly acceptable in the modern world once it has acquired an ethnic mix more akin to, say, Brixton or Handsworth. In the US, where this attitude is just as prevalent as it is here, they call it the Great White Liberal Death Wish.
Personally, I found Exeter quite a boring place to hang out, and Topsham even duller. But you know what? I’ll bet when Sir Trevor McDonald went to live there, he wasn’t longing for it to be culturally enriched by some drum ’n’ bass clubs, goat curry shacks and stalls selling ackee fruit. In fact, I’m guessing that one of the things that drew him there was its solid, unrepentant whiteness.
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