The ghost of Enoch
The Observer comments on Hodge Hill, Leicester South & Hartlepool
Racist election tactics and other dirty tricks are back ... and we're not talking about the Tories
Just before the Leicester South by-election on 15 July a flier was slipped under the windscreen wipers of cars in the constituency. It showed a picture of Parmjit Singh Gill, the Liberal Democrat candidate, shaking the hand of one Stephanie Dearden. She looked odd, like a man: indeed, the flier told us, she once was a man...
...It's no secret who put out leaflets during the by-election held on the same day in Birmingham Hodge Hill which followed a West Midlands tradition of gutter politicians appealing to xenophobia...
... Liam Byrne, the Labour candidate, told the voters, 'I know that people here are worried about fraudulent asylum claims and illegal immigration. Yet the Lib Dems ignore what people say. They ignore what local people really want. The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in Parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money -and mine - to go to failed asylum seekers.'
Labour didn't mention that the disputed measure was a plan to take the children of asylum seekers from their parents and put them into care, which Michael Howard had denounced as 'despicable'...
...The Hartlepool by-election will come first. The Tories are out of it, as they are out of most things, and once again Labour isn't fighting the Lib Dems on its impressive economic record. Instead it's following the pattern of Hodge Hill and accusing its rivals of being soft on drugs, soft on pornography, soft on teen gangs and soft on crack houses. Typical of the guff was Labour's claim that the Lib Dem lawyer candidate had made 'excuses for junkies', because she had once represented heroin addicts in court.
Barristers have to take whatever cases are allocated to them. By Labour's logic Cherie Blair is a supporter of the poll tax because she once represented councils seeking to extract money from protestors who couldn't or wouldn't pay.
I shouldn't have to add that raising prejudices by banging on about crime and race are the desperate strategies of right-wing parties with their backs to the wall, and you might have expected an uprising from within the Labour ranks.
But where is a principled opposition to come from? From the Labour left? At the time of the Hodge Hill election Ken Livingstone was embracing as a comrade Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a 'moderate' Muslim leader, whose Islam Online website supports the murder of Israeli civilians because 'on the hour of judgment, Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them'; describes homosexuality as an 'evil and unnatural practice', which can only be stopped when Islamic society is cleansed of its 'perverted elements'; says rape victims must carry a portion of the guilt if they dress 'immodestly'; and advises that a husband may beat his wife 'lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts'.
The new Respect Party, which boldly proclaims itself to be a left-wing alternative to Labour, is as willing to ally with religious barbarism and the enemies of the Enlightenment as Livingstone, and is led by George Galloway, a man who flew to Baghdad to greet a fascist dictator with: 'Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.'
These are paradoxical times. The Conservative Party is nowhere, but conservative ideas are everywhere, not least on a left whose manic skid to the far right makes the slipperiness of the Liberal Democrats and the willingness of Labour to betray its principles appear modest changes of position in comparison.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL REPORT
