It is official: UK politicians and other public figures use racist hate speech
JVL Introduction
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racism (CERD) has voiced concern over persistent hate crimes, hate speech and xenophobic incidents on various platforms, including by politicians and public figures and considers that this is a serious issue for the UK. This work is carried out on all countries and the UK was last reviewed in 2016. Obviously most of the criticisms relate to the period of Tory government but there is unlikely to be meaningful change under this Labour government. One of the government’s spokespeople said (August 23rd 2024) “There is no excuse for the hatred, violence and intimidation we saw online and on our streets.” Of course we agree that there is no excuse but also agree with “Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a thinktank working on immigration, integration and race, (when he) said politicians’ use of terms such as “invaders” and “illegals”, and slogans such as “stop the boats”, along with classifying male refugees as “men of fighting age”, was “probably legitimising violent responses”. Labour has said nothing about the racist language which the report refers to and, indeed continuing in much the same vein even if they have, for example, scrapped the Rwanda scheme.
We commend the full report to you as well as this article. You can read the summary here which has links to the more detailed reporting, and the press release here.
LL
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Fri 23 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
UK must curb rise in racist hate speech by politicians and public figures, UN says
Review also highlights racial profiling in police practices, and failure to address legacies of colonialism and slavery
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It can never be repeated enough that even recent rioters were re-using New Labour’s Blair/Brown’s collective guilt narrative of ‘Militant Islam’ & ‘Radical Islam’.
They were also repeating New Labour’s, and particularly Sarah Champion MP’s ‘Muslims as Sex-offenders’ narrative – there was nothing in the crime statistical percentages to back this up. This was a cynical repeat of KKK and affiliates using the same smear tactic in the US to justify the torturous lynchings of African-American men.
These strategic racist attacks on Muslim collective identities were used to undermine the victim status of those assailed y homicidal western militarism and torture, and even their status as genuine members of humanity.
Don’t hold your breaths expecting a news media that allocates roles to Ed Balls despite his Collective Cabinet Responsibility for these practices, and to Alastair Campbell despite the deaths of people-of-colour from his ‘dodgy dossier,’ to act critically on this UN report.
“The committee members declined to name which politicians or public figures had made comments triggering the committee’s concern…”
I am confident that without naming such politicians and public figures with credible quotes, the report is meaningless.
It is not only the rhetoric against that is harmful. It is the absence of a positive message, acknowledging the huge debt the UK owns to migrants and its active need of them. Not just to work but to carry on waking Brits up to other cultures. Starmer could have made a memorable, important speech about this, which might have defined his premiership. instead he treads a cautious, and yes I do believe it, a racist path. It is a shame and nothing good will come of it.