Racing Certainties

I may be blocked from reading his tweets, which I have checked elsewhere and found to be all about football.

But I should like to share in the undoubted joy of Neil Fleming, the demoted former Director of Labour North, that The X Factor was not won by one of us "Mulattoes".

We were not permitted to be District Council candidates in the constituency that Hilary Armstrong, who presumably now uses her peerage in the Britain First interest or in that of the EDL, was lining up for her perfect little Aryan specimen.

A dozen years later, we are still not allowed to win The X Factor. Or so it will seem to those two. And so it will delight them.

They will only be sorry that Fleur was not hanged from a tree for her uppitiness. If either of them ever met her, then she probably would be.

If you cannot be doing with us Creoles, then avoid the Western Cape, where we, including some of my relatives, make up over half the population. But time was when that was the place to go if you wanted to lord it over us.

Ah, yes. Jim Murphy.

His parents' move to South Africa in 1979 can only have been a political act. A lot of people were made redundant and did not move to the apartheid state.

Specifically, they wound up in the Western Cape, and they seem to have had something to do with Robben Island while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there. In any event, it is worth looking into exactly what they were doing under P W Botha.

It is also worth looking into exactly what their son was doing under P W Botha. He was there between the ages of 12 and 18.

Culturally speaking, he is more than anything a 1980s white South African, and one raised in a home that had been set up specifically in order to avail itself of the opportunities presented by that order.

The age of conscription into the South African Defence Force was 16, or when you left school, whichever happened later.

Murphy's subsequent nine years at university without ever taking a degree indicate that he has never been much of an academic shining light. He turned 16 in 1983.

Had the apartheid regime still existed in 1994 (when it was not long gone), then some sort of rapprochement with it would have been integral to Tony Blair's "modernisation" project.

If there was one thing on which Old Labour was united, then it was opposition to apartheid. But the Thatcherite press expressed a very different view. Guess which line Blair would have taken.

Moreover, from September 2001 onwards, apartheid South Africa would have met every criterion, and surpassed most or all of them, for classification as a key "partner" in "The War Against Terror", which my erstwhile housemate who is now the Labour Party's Head of Research used in those days to say ought to be known by its acronym.

And now, look who is Blairism's de facto Leader on these shores, at least pending the extradition of David Miliband to answer torture-related charges.

Of course, the racism of New Labour has not been news to some of us for a very long time.