Breathtakingly Patronising? – Check! It Must Be The ‘Indy’, Then…

Deborah Ross produces the most insulting, sneering article I’ve yet seen in the ‘Indy’. And that’s saying something.

She’s despatched to East London to go on the campaign trail with the BNP, just like...well, a lot of reporters. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if the BNP doesn’t consist of just three men and a dog, and all the others in the entourage are journalists and documentary filmmakers…

I’m not alone in that thought either:

So, I'm off to spend the day with the British National Party which appals almost everyone I know – "Poor you"; "Say you're busy"; "Can't you pull a sickie?" – but I find I'm peculiarly thrilled and excited.

Eh..?

I find the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, which basically means going east on the District line until you fall off at the end.

Ummm, no, sweetie.

That would be Upminster, a good few stops further

As I tip up, an altercation is already taking place – oh, joy of joys – between a BNP man in a sandy-coloured suit and a fat, white tattooed fellow with a neck thicker than his head and a Staffordshire bull terrier snarling at his side. "You got a problem with my bird, looking over the fence," the tattooed man is shouting, while jabbing the sandy-suited man in the chest. "Next time you come over, I'll hit you with a shovel!"

My God, you don't get this at Blenheim! Hit him with the shovel! Quick, someone find him a shovel!

Any other strange and exotic native rituals these people should perform for you, Deborah?

But, disappointingly, the minders manage to talk the tattooed man down. What was that all about? I ask. "That," says one of the minders, "was because Richard Barnbrook [the sandy-suited man, a BNP councillor] looked over the other fellow's fence where his girlfriend was having a bonfire, and he got cross about it."

Oh, how quaint!

The minder is friendly and later updates me on where dog-fighting is at these days. "They use them Japanese akita dogs now. They can pick up a Staffie and it's gone." He also says: "I can't give you my real name, love, for security reasons, but it's Terry."

Gosh, it must be like starring in your very own episode of ‘Minder’ directed by Guy Ritchie, eh, Deborah?

The job, today, is to press the flesh and distribute flyers. The flyers come with the headline "New Labour Have Changed The Face of Barking & Dagenham" and juxtapose two photographs. One shows pretty, white young women in tea-dresses, lining a street on what appears to be VE Day, and has a "From this..." arrow on it. The other, meanwhile, has a "To this..." arrow on it, and shows three women in burkhas, one of whom is giving the finger. I confess I have never personally seen a woman in a burkha give the finger but, like I said, perhaps I've lived in some kind of bubble.

Well, we are beginning to rather get that impression, Deborah…

Now, this is all very amusing, but I suspect if she’d written in this vein about any other borough or area, it wouldn’t have graced the pages of such a politically-correct organ of the media as the ‘Indy’.

How about you?