Pennsylvania: The BNP row feels remote and oddly more unsettling from here; distant thunder portending a calamitous coming one can sense, but not yet quite define. "What's going on, what happened to polite old England?" asks my best friend, a family physician in Pittsburgh, who, like me, is an Asian from Uganda.Well, of course! No diversity in the friends list for our Yasmin. Two birds of the same feather, flocking together...
She is shocked after listening on radio to some of the grumpy old folk from these isles and their practised grievances about immigrants, people of colour, Muslims, white liberals, politicians, and the other usual suspects.Oh, this’ll be good…
I explain.
These punters have lost out as global capitalism sweeps away job security and certainties. Their terror is understandable but not their faith in the Nazi and racist BNP, which promises to vigorously wash off foreign muck and make Britain linen white again.Oh, it’s capitalism that’s the culprit here, is it?
Somehow, I think your ‘explanation’ is a little lacking in facts.
But then, I think, be charitable. Maybe she hadn’t seen the weekend papers when she wrote this column?
Once Nick Griffin is in 10 Downing Street, they must believe, Vicky Pollard and Waynetta Slob will at long last run Goldman Sachs, all-night corner shops will be opened by ambitious aboriginal Brits and Prince William will be available to marry the chimney sweep's illegitimate daughter. I mock, but it is only to deflect my own fears of what the future may hold.If any white columnist had written such a caricature of an ethnic minority, can you imagine the outcry? In fact, can you imagine an editor letting it through?
Me neither. So I’m not entirely sure what she has to fear…
In Britain, meanwhile, even though it has been hugely comforting to watch white Britons recoiling from Mr Griffin…For ‘white Britons’ read ‘all the white people in Yasmin’s circle’…
…22 per cent of those polled after his Question Time appearance said they would consider voting for his hate-loaded band, some of whom are violent.I’m confused.
Some of the 22 per cent are violent? Or some of the BNP? Does this woman have an editor?
Things can only get worse. Sleepless in Pittsburgh, I struggle with the woeful possibility that my unborn grandchildren may still have to fight to be accepted in Britain. They could move to North America.Well, you certainly didn’t let the grass grow under your feet when things got uncomfortable under Idi Amin, did you?
Let’s hope, though, that if it comes to that, your grandchildren are a little more grateful to their host nation than you’ve proved yourself to be…
Have we wasted all those years, trying to get our adopted homeland to embrace its diverse history and multifarious soul? I fear so, but we soldier on.You brave little trooper, you…
Because it’s all about you, isn’t it, Yasmin?
Thanks for reminding me what a cesspool the Independent is. If I wrote for that thing, I'd shoot myself.
ReplyDeleteShe is sectionable, quite mad and racist.
ReplyDeleteAnd her middle class white friends aren't in any serious way threatened yet by Yasmin's less fastidious co-religionists and fellow immigrants.
ReplyDeleteThat nice Chilean man who runs the tapas bar on the High Street and the Somali couple who garden and clean for all their fiends didn't just jump ahead of anyone from their neighbourhood in the employment queue, and their sons and daughters can get taxis through or past the parts of Britain where the Queen's Peace not only means nothing: but it's held to be blasphemous.
Bottoms.
ReplyDeleteThat hould have been "...who garden and clean for all their fRiends."
I'm reading Paradise Lost: it gets to you.
"Have we wasted all those years, trying to get our adopted homeland to embrace its diverse history and multifarious soul?" -
ReplyDeleteNot at the expense of ours Yasmin and believe it or not, there are some of us not interested in doing so at all!
By all means bugger off. The US IS a multicultural hotchpotch. The "Aboriginal Indians" lost their country to immigrants a couple of hundred years ago and now reside in reservations on land fit for nothing!
We do not intend going down so easily!
Everything you need to know about this odious woman was summed up in one remark she made on Dateline London. The question was, why can't the English have a regional assembly? Yasmin's contribution?
ReplyDelete"Well, they'd have to have it in Henley or somewhere, we've got Westminster."
Who we, non-white woman?
YA-B's offensive caricatures of poorer English people read like an inverted script for 'Mind Your Language' 30 years on. The superficiality of her thoughts, and her barely concealed contempt for the 'wrong' sort of people who hold the same passport as her, are still in a class of their own.
ReplyDelete"...distant thunder portending a calamitous coming..."
ReplyDelete*on my knees, hands clasped*
'Please, pleeease, let it be'
In light of the situation following the Andrew Neather revelations, I think anyone (looking at Yasmin A-B in particular) who condemns the current junta should have an outlet.
ReplyDeleteSomething like "Better off honest", whether pro- or anti-immigration, condemning NuLab perfidy.
And fucking no-platform and picket anyone who doesn't sign up.
Can you tell that I'm somewhat upset?
Kieran
I found this Dana Lyons t-shirt for Yasmin. It's not aimed at her, but it should annoy her, so that's good.
ReplyDeleteBovine note: Dana Lyons wrote "Cows With Guns" and may be of interest to you, JuliaM, although the song is often wrongly attributed to The Arrogant Worms. The Worms wrote the companion piece I Am Cow