The Rainbow Nation?

On last night's Newsnight, Jesse Jackson entirely misunderstood the word "Asian" in a British context, assuming it to mean, not "South Asian", but, as in America, "East Asian". Admittedly, he can at least distinguish Asian-Americans from Hispanics, unlike Sharron Angle. And at least he is not Al Sharpton, just as at least Sharpton is not one of those African-American leaders who are banned from this country, such as Louis Farrakhan and the late Stokely Carmichael.

But Jackson obviously knows nothing whatever about racial politics in Britain. Yet here he is, taking over the black aspects of it, which are overwhelmingly of Afro-Caribbean, or these days increasingly of African, origin, and barely, if at all, related to African-American culture; you will be under no illusion on that score if, like me, you have ever witnessed enthusiastic rapping along to their preferred musical accompaniment by upper-middle-class white undergraduates from the suburbs or the countryside. If the things being colonised from Harlem and Chicago were being run from the Caribbean or from Africa, as they sometimes have been and are, then that would be bad enough. This, however, is not merely outrageous, although it is certainly that. It is downright bizarre.

Alas, though, it is very much of the present age. Leave aside, for now, the subjugation of our foreign and defence policy to the United States, or the supremacy of EU over British law, or the fact that we are all subject to the legislative will of the assorted headcases who turn up in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, or the separatist administration in Scotland, or the presence of a borderline separatist and undoubtedly language-fascist party in that of Wales, or the running of Northern Ireland by the alliance between a fringe fundamentalist sect and people who believe the Provisional Army Council to the sovereign body throughout Ireland. All of that is well-known, although none of it is anywhere near as profoundly appreciated as it ought to be.

No, as if all, or even any, of that were not bad enough, we now have Jackson and worse clod-hopping about. We now have all political parties in certain Midland, Yorkshire and North-Western towns and cities run as (by no means always predictable) proxies for rival factions in Pakistan, to the extent that the rally designed to name Asif Ali Zardari's son as sole Chairman of the Pakistan People's Party was held in Birmingham, with a large rival demonstration outside; Glasgow is heading the same way, as both Labour's selection of a candidate for its safe seat of Glasgow Central, and the scramble for the Conservatives' list seat at Holyrood, make abundantly clear. We now have an entire London Borough in which political life is being directed from Bangladesh, even if one does have to laugh at the implicit suggestion that the East End was somehow a model of probity before the Bengalis shipped up. We now have thriving scenes loyal to each of Hindutva and Khalistan, both of which were significant at the Ealing Southall by-election. And so on, and on, and on.

What's that you say? Immigration? Well, it is a contributing factor, of course, although few voters for the SNP, fewer for Plaid Cymru, and none for the DUP or Sinn Féin are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants, or the great-grandchildren of immigrants. But what of the burgeoning white nationalist movement, increasingly centred, not even on the collapsing BNP, but on the EDL, which has deep, deep roots in the "casual" football hooliganism of the Eighties and Nineties? It, too, is foreign-funded and foreign-controlled, by the Tea Party and by the secular Israeli Hard Right, which is currently in government, and whose American branch office was recently addressed by one Rupert Murdoch. Ah, yes, Rupert Murdoch...