LIKE most MPs, I’m lucky to receive hundreds of emails a day from constituents who need my help in resolving a situation they may have with their pension or social security payments, from others who want my views on the major issues of the day and some from charities or lobbyists asking for my support for one important cause or another.
Each piece of correspondence represents an opportunity to help others, or to demonstrate how and where I’m holding the UK government to account.
There is now, however, another type of email that I receive with depressing regularity. That is the communication that begins by setting out the author’s progressive values and world experience.
It goes on to state, quite explicitly, how they could not possibly be labelled a racist, as these truths are self-evident. It then, with dismal certainty, goes on to make a range of clearly racist remarks about the threat of immigration, foreigners and those who don’t share their religious views.
I’ve written in the past about the damaging social impact of “dog whistle” messages in politics, where the underlying intolerance is hidden, or dressed up in respectable clothes by politicians who feel queasy about the rhetoric, but who feel compelled to use it for electoral gain.
In the space of this EU Referendum campaign, we’re now approaching the point of “post-dog whistle” politics, where those elected to office no longer feel morally obliged to camouflage their true beliefs. If “I’m not racist, but…” was the opening gambit of these arguments, the comments by Nigel Farage over the weekend, when he said that there could be an increased risk of sex attacks on women by migrants if Britain stays in the EU, has crossed that moral boundary.
There are many civilised and compassionate people who will be voting to leave the EU on the 23rd of June. I fundamentally disagree with them on this issue, but notwithstanding this, their views are grounded in decency and respect for others.
The leader of Ukip does not fall into this category.
Nigel Farage’s rhetoric is racist, and he’s not ashamed to show it.
When he uttered his outrageous comments about migrants with HIV clogging up our health service during a TV debate prior to the last General Election, I thought that the George Galloway of the right had established a nadir in our public debate.
It seems that I was mistaken.
There are seemingly no depths to which he will not trawl to scrape together support for his desperate cause.
It is despicable and wrong, and we must use every public platform we have to call him out for his divisive and damaging prejudices.
Rather than electing a party leader who demonstrates at the very least the positive values of leadership, Ukip members have elevated a demagogue who encapsulates their own warped view of the world around them. Nigel Farage is a leader who laughed and shrugged when presented with evidence of his senior representatives in Scotland colluding to make racist remarks on a public platform with Muslim members of the SNP, including comments about myself.
This is a party leader, who is given regular airtime by the BBC and others, who has allowed a notable liar, a man who was found by a Parliamentary inquiry to have taken cash to ask questions in the House of Commons, to ascend to lead their party in Wales and whose own former officials in Scotland have labelled their leader as “not suited to being the Scottish face of the Brexit campaign”.
I’m proud that voters in Scotland have once again rejected Ukip’s views at the ballot box this year, and that the prediction by some that Holyrood would be fundamentally tarnished by the presence of a Ukip MSP were unfounded.
Part of this success has been because rather than dismissing Farage and his cronies as “loonies” or “harmless eccentrics” many in Scotland have worked hard to expose them for what they really are.
Just as racist rhetoric continually espoused by Donald Trump poisons public discourse, Nigel Farage’s bigoted comments last weekend will undoubtedly stoke division and hatred here at home.
The first stage of solving a problem is in recognising that it exists. We can’t hide from the use of this type of inflammatory language and hope it goes away.
We must face up to these repellent, racist views if we are to raise the level of public debate to the standards that our country deserves.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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