ENGLAND has been wracked by racist riots and BBC Scotland's Kaye Adams tells her listeners that we need to talk about immigration – eh no Kaye, we need to talk about British nationalist racism and why media figures like you are so keen to normalise the talking points of the far-right. 

The right-wing's obsession with immigration has some extremely damaging real-world consequences, and that is what the likes of Adams and others in the British media really need to be talking about.

The events of the past week, a direct result of the media and right-wing fixation on immigration, have cause deep alarm and fear amongst minority communities, many of whose members were not only born in the UK themselves, but so were their parents and grandparents. 

Many are now afraid to go out and are seriously questioning whether they and their families can have a future in their own country.  

One such is former first minister Humza Yousaf who said this week that he is considering his and his family's future in the UK, saying that he was concerned for the safety of his family. 

Yousaf said: “You cut me open, I’m about as Scottish as they come. But the truth of the matter is, I don’t know whether the future for me and my wife and my three children is going to be here in Scotland or the United Kingdom or indeed in Europe and the West, because I have for some time really worried about the rise of Islamophobia.”  

Islamophobia is now widespread, even in supposedly mainstream political parties. Just this week Conservative leadership contender Robert Jenrick questioned why people who say Allahu Akbar in public places are not arrested for hate speech. 

Allahu Akbar is Arabic for "God is Great." It is not hate speech, it is a basic tenet of the Islamic faith and as such is no more hateful than Praise the Lord or Halleluiah. 

There has been a concerted push amongst the European right in recent years to depict Islam and Muslims as an "alien" presence in Europe. This is historically illiterate. 

There has been a continuous Muslim presence in Europe since the year 711 when the Umayyad general Tariq Ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and initiated the Muslim conquest of southern Iberia and founded the Islamic kingdoms of Andalus which lasted almost 800 years and were the pinnacle of European civilisation in the early Middle Ages. 

Gibraltar itself is named after Tariq Ibn Ziyad, deriving from the Arabic Jebel Al Tariq Tariq's Mountain. Arabic place names abound in southern Spain, including Benidorm, the resort so beloved of readers of the Daily Express and The Sun. The town is named for the Muslim tribe which once inhabited the area.  

The Arabic language introduced into Europe in the 700s still survives and flourishes to this day. The Maltese language, although now written in the Latin alphabet with a couple of additional letters, is the direct descendant of the Arabic formerly widespread in Sicily. Maltese is spoken by the descendants of Arabic speaking Muslims who converted to Catholicism in the Middle Ages. 

Not counting the European part of Turkey, there are three Muslim majority countries in Europe: Bosnia Herzegovina, where the plurality of the multiethnic population are Muslim Bosniaks, Slavic speaking Muslims; Albania, and Kosovo. 

There is also a small Muslim population in Poland and Lithuania, the Lipka Tatars, which has been established there since the 1300s.

Viktor Orbán, the far-right authoritarian leader of Hungary, is one of the leading advocates of the pernicious “Muslims as alien” myth, but the truth is that Muslims have been settled in Europe longer than the Hungarians. 

The Hungarians descend from a Siberian tribe which did not arrive in the territory of modern Hungary until the around the year 895, by which time Muslims had been settled in southern Europe for around 170 years. 

Anyone who tells you that Muslims are alien to Europe is themself alien to European history. 

‘Sucking up to racists is more of a priority to both Labour and the Tories’ 

Before leaving office, the Conservatives toughened up the visa rules for those seeking to come to the UK. The rules were introduced in a naked bid to pander to the anti-immigration prejudices of the right-wing press. 

The new Labour Government has chosen to maintain these rules even though a leading immigration think tank has warned that keeping the restrictive Conservative regulations risks putting more pressure on the health service and universities.  

According to The Times, the number of visas issued for skilled health and social care workers and students fell by more than a third in July to 91,300 compared with last year.

Monthly applications for health and social care visas have plummeted, with an 82% drop to 2900 in July, while the number of foreigners applying to study at UK universities has fallen by 15% to 69,500. 

The Conservatives banned those coming to work on health and social care visas from bringing family with them, a policy Labour have kept in place since coming to power.  

Sucking up to racists is more of a priority to both Labour and the Conservatives than the staffing levels of the NHS and social care services. 

The recent spate of racist violence in England will only discourage other much needed workers in the health and social care workers from applying to live and work in the UK, putting additional strain on already over stretched public services. 

If it were only those racists who had been rioting that would be forced to wait longer to see a doctor or to receive vital social care that might not be so bad, but this affects all of us. 

These are the real issues Kaye Adams needs to be talking about, not making out that far-right racists have a valid point about immigration.