Thursday, December 31, 2015

Racist apologists rule OK

Hats off to whichever Tory spin doctor described the now infamous Letwin memo on the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot as a "historical" document "written by a policy team whose main task was to challenge orthodox views". Whenever UKIP or the BNP attempt to justify their old-school racism and xenophobia by claiming that they're merely "challenging orthodox views", they get (rightly) savaged for it - but apparently it's perfectly OK for the nation's ruling party to do so. It takes real chutzpah to argue that institutional racism is the opposite of narrow-mindedness.

Over to Chuka Umunna to treat the Tories' response to the scandal with the contempt it deserves: "The authors of this paper illustrate a complete ignorance of what was going on in our community at that time, as evidenced by their total and utter disregard of the rampant racism in the Met Police which caused the community to boil over - there is no mention of that racism in their paper. The attitudes towards the black community exhibited in the paper are disgusting and appalling. The tone of it in places is positively Victorian."

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