http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013 ... och-powell



Oh yeah, he was really out of line there

The Tories are panicking though. I suspect that they are worried about losing significant numbers of racists within their party to UKIP.

It's not just the Tories that are panicking though. UKIP have also clearly rattled Labour as well.
And in fairness to the Lib Dems they're actually one of the few parties actually challenging the hysteria about immigration.

The basic political impulse is to first define groups of insiders and outsiders, and then to shelter the insiders and shun the outsiders. It is myopic to presume that racism is a left or right wing issue (if you haven't met any racists who vote Labour you haven't got out much) because the left and the right share this tendency equally. All of the differences between them can be summarized as a dispute over which groups are to be seen as worthy, and how to reform the unworthy.

The underlying principles of Liberalism (which the Lib Dems imperfectly represent) can be seen as an attempt to minimize this dichotomy by extending insider rights more universally, and a general rejection of interference in other people's decisions about where to go and what to do. That's the ideal anyway, it gets messy when forced to interact with reality as does any other principle. But Liberalism as a high minded concept has the apparent moral virtue of fundamental incompatibility with racism, whereas competing creeds require contingent (and therefore negotiable) rejection of the same.

My point being that one can easily be of the left or the right and be a racist too. But to be a Liberal and a racist is inherently hypocritical (my point is explicitly not that there are no people who think they are liberals and hold racist values that they imagine are consistent, some people are after all stupid).


Alas, it would be slightly dishonest of me not to note that the Aliens Act of 1905, to which Vince referred, was enacted by a Liberal government and was in essence a rule to prevent immigration by poor Jews. So one step forward, two steps back and all that.