The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

During my lifetime racism has graduated from a vulgar faux pas to a crime. Like most white Britons I’ve accepted this. It sometimes seemed excessive but, hey, what did I know? Maybe black and brown Britons had it worse than I understood? I didn’t recognise the evil they feared in me, my family, or friends. But I didn’t know all the UK’s white people. I was prepared to believe there are nasty ones among us. I still am.

I encountered racism in person only once. It happened when I gave a black fellow student a lift home from the College of Law. He invited me and my then girlfriend in for coffee. His mother and brother violently objected to having white people in their home in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1979. He insisted but boy did we squirm. I’d never heard racial hatred expressed before but I wasn’t afraid, just curious. Is that what’s called “white privilege?”

It has often seemed to me since that black and brown Britons’ seeming obsession with racism might partly be psychological projection. My white family — including its most elderly members — accepted my Indian second wife without any concerns except as to her character and motivations. Once they believed she was for real, they made her welcome.

Her cousin, his wife and kids used to delight my elderly parents by visiting them on their trips North. My parents loved their little girls and looked forward to the visits. They were nice kids. What kind of assholes would care what colour their skin was?

When she left me for another man, Mrs P II was missed – and not just by me.

I have never heard an anti-semitic sentiment in my own circles during my whole life in the UK. I became a partner in a predominantly-Jewish law firm in London back in the 80’s. No friends or family were surprised. They didn’t even express any curiosity about my Jewish colleagues. So how did we reach a point where a Jewish man is arrested for wearing a Star of David? Why must we now fear that might provoke anti-semitic violence? Please don’t tell me that I am racist when I state the obvious answer. It’s because of some brown Britons.

The police have banned a group of football fans from visiting Birmingham. Why? Because of open, naked racism — in its oldest form of antisemitism. That’s not coming from white Britons. All white Britons I know are horrified by it. Not to mention that we’re cringing with embarrassment at such backward, barbaric primitivism being associated with our nation.

Even our Far Left PM claims to be upset. Not upset enough to act with the sort of vigour he showed in Southport, of course.

It’s time to stop and think again. We may have tied ourselves up in laws to protect evildoers (for racism is evil) from their own psychologically projected fears.

I’d prefer we revert to regarding racism as bad-mannered stupidity. I’d abolish all the “hate crime” laws that force mediocre coppers into wrestling with abstruse sociological concepts. If we really must retain laws against this evil nonsense, however, they should apply equally to all communities where it’s actually a problem.