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back to Current affairs indexDear Sir
I scoured David Blunkett's article (I can't back down on asylum, 14 December 2003) in vain for any policies designed to encourage pride in diversity or even positive affirmations on the benefits of decades of increased mobility and the consequent blossoming of multicultural communities. All I found was more hand wringing on the problems of being Home Secretary and dire warnings on giving encouragement to the extreme Right.
Labour politicians never seem to learn the lesson that it is impossible to appease the extreme Right. It can always outflank the "mainstream" parties and it will invariably feed off a negative attitude which stresses the need to limit and control as if there was somehow something detrimental in the concept of transmigration and multicultural society. Electors who pick up that message accurately might as well support those who articulate it more vividly. Only a message that these are positive benefits can begin to persuade the xenophobes and the fearful to abandon parties that trade on division and racism.
David Blunkett raises the spectre of the 1930s. The Nazi party came into office because the Weimar parties had no positive alternative and, in the face of the rise of the Nazi party, tried to espouse a benign nationalism; in office the Nazis justified their viciousness and repression by reference to lurid but largely non-existent threats to the security of the state. It is similar attitudes today which are the real danger to our society.
In recent times we have had opposition to the Ugandan Asians and to the Vietnamese boat people, all of whom are contributing to the wealth and diversity of modern Britain. Now we cynically recruit doctors, teachers and nurses from developing countries - the very people most needed in their home areas. Selfishness and nationalism are shameful bedfellows for a once proudly internationalist Labour movement.
Yours faithfully
Michael Meadowcroft