Letts Not

You do not have to like Jack Letts to be extremely concerned when politicians start revoking people's citizenship. If you would merely qualify for another nationality, whether or not you held it or wanted it, then your British citizenship can now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

Saint Helena has never become independent and it never will, so I am all right this side of Scottish independence. But beyond the fair South Atlantic, most of Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean are independent now. And 50 per cent of people in Britain with an Afro-Caribbean parent also have a white parent.

If you are in that position, even if your other ancestors have been Anglo-Saxon for as long as there have been any Anglo-Saxons, or even if Julius Caesar heard them speaking the language that is now Welsh, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

If you are one of the huge proportion of the population of Great Britain with an ancestral connection to Ireland, or if you are almost any of the current inhabitants of Northern Ireland including all 10 DUP MPs, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

And if you would qualify under Israel's Law of Return, which is considerably looser than the Rabbinical definition of who is Jewish, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. How about that for anti-Semitism?

All this, and the return of the sus law, too. This is the most racist British Government since the term became current. But then, look at the other side. Never mind the sus law. When that lot was last in, then it tried to introduce the pass laws.

Look at Margaret Hodge, who recently called Shraga Stern "a second-class Jew". Look at Nick Cohen, who has demanded that Stern be banished from public life on account of his Yiddish accent. Look at Jess Phillips, who has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons, and who became famous by claiming to have been rude and abusive towards Britain's most prominent black politician, Diane Abbott.

Look at John Mann, who writes racist material against Gypsy, Romany and Traveller people, and who then distributes it to his constituents. Look at Ruth Smeeth, who organised a lynch mob of dozens of Labour MPs and Peers to march through London and demand, successfully, the expulsion of the immensely distinguished black activist Marc Wadsworth from the Labour Party, not for having lied about Smeeth, but for having been so uppity a Coloured as to have told the truth about her. 

Look at all of the BAME Labour MPs, not one of whom has defended either Wadsworth or Jackie Walker. Look at the newly martyred Owen Jones, who has likewise remained silent rather than support Wadsworth, or Walker, or Tony Greenstein, or Chris Williamson, or Julian Assange, or anyone else.

Look at Claire Kober, who sought to emulate apartheid South Africa by bulldozing Tottenham and building an all-white luxury gated community over its rubble. Look at David Miliband, who created the "Chagos Marine Protected Area" in order to prevent the Chagossians from returning to their homeland.

Look at Tony Blair, who with George Bush has killed more brown people than any other white man alive. Look at Hilary Armstrong, who at the same time as she was Chief Whip on the Iraq War was banning me from becoming a Labour District Council candidate in her constituency because I was mixed-race. Look at Laura Pidcock, whose election literature in 2017 featured Armstrong's name, face, and words of endorsement. 

And look at Simon Henig, the George Wallace of our time, who is now banned from the Durham Miners' Gala in solidarity with everyone from the Teaching Assistants, to the Palestinians, to me. Henig's attack on the Teaching Assistants is racist at least in effect, and they have been brought to their sorry pass by the treacherous political advice of Pidcock's Political Advisor, Ben Sellout. 

One could go on.

The Conservative Party is the party of the Windrush scandal and the party that, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, relegalised caste-based discrimination. Theresa May's Chief of Staff was Gavin Barwell, who as Housing Minister had caused the deaths at Grenfell Tower, itself a property of a flagship Conservative Council. In 2011, under the Coalition, teenage black boys were convicted of rioting based on CCTV footage of entirely different teenage black boys. "They all look the same," you see.

Boris Johnson calls black people "piccaninnies", and Muslim women "letterboxes". His Home Secretary, who has denaturalised Letts, is a close ally both of Narendra Modi and of Benjamin Netanyahu. Modi's Education Minister has slashed scholarships for Dalits (so-called "Untouchables"), while Netanyahu's Education Minister has described marriage between Jews and non-Jews as "a second Holocaust".

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has adopted the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, a silencing of BAME, refugee and migrant voices redolent of Windrush and of Grenfell Tower. Labour submits to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which sacks its black and disabled staff first, which exonerated the Government in relation to Windrush, and members of which profited from Windrush and from blacklisting.

A Labour Government evicted the Palestinians. A Labour Government evicted the people of the Chagos Islands, at the same time as it was repressing demonstrations in Hong Kong far more brutally than is happening at the moment. As has already been mentioned, a Labour Government sought to banish the Chagossians permanently by creating the "Chagos Marine Protected Area".

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. Buy the book here.

I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.