Is UKIP the BNP for the middle class?

Last night there were hustings of parliamentary candidates for our two local constituencies. I wasn’t able to go, but a friend showed me the programme afterwards. Alongside candidates from the three major parties were two UKIP candidates. It seemed normal to everyone that there were UKIP candidates on the platform, not arousing the controversy that having BNP candidates there would have created.

It seems UKIP’s main electoral tool is elector ignorance, with a bit of media fearmongering to boot. When I ask people what UKIP stands for, everyone says they are against the EU, and when pressed add that they’re probably anti-immigration too. For those who would never dream of voting for the fascist BNP, UKIP seems to them an attractive alternative to the major parties, but I’m sure they are not aware of what UKIP stands for.

UKIP’s immigration policy is against the UN Convention on Refugees, and so both UKIP and the BNP state that they would withdraw the UK from it. They would also repeal the Human Rights Act in order to deliver the harsher forms of ‘justice’ they relish. Any lover of liberty should start to hear alarm bells when a political group advocates the rolling back of our human rights.

Persecution or privilege: the Church Defensive

During Holy Week, I had a couple of episcopal moments. On Palm Sunday, six bishops signed a letter in the Sunday Torygraph that didn’t use the word ‘persecution’, but the resulting headlines did, and one sermon I’ve heard since has. Archbishop Rowan felt it necessary to say publically that they should get things in perspective in his Easter Letter: hear, hear!

The next day, on Maundy Thursday, the Bishop of London felt it necessary refute ‘persecution’ claims in his chrism sermon, but then he went on to talk about how Christians have to fight against the discrimination aimed at us and battle the tide of secularism (this clunkily segued into the twice-repeated materialist motto ‘love is not an emotion’).

On Easter Sunday evening, Nicky Campbell brought out a TV documentary asking whether Christians are persecuted. The show gave fairly free reign to those who wanted to ramp up the persecution fears, but also got the sane voices of the Bishop of Oxford and Theos think-tank in there. I quite liked the clear outline of why the persecution fear exists: that it is based on

1. the complex secularising of hegemony,
2. increased non-Christian immigration
3. and human-rights legislation.

Whereas the fearmongers, like Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, would point to the secularisation of society as the cause, and crusade for the re-Christianisation of our public spaces, the documentary’s outline gives us more substantial handles for what is happening.

Daily Mail calls immigrants animals

The Daily Mail, more commonly known as the Daily Hate, published a cartoon based on a vulgarly twisted interpretation of an old government report on Britain’s need for migrant workers (via Liberal Conspiracy). The cartoon, as misunderstood by the hate-mongers of that obscene rag, is about multiculturalism going ‘too far’, but they didn’t notice that they just equated immigrants with animals. The cartoon is of a man marrying a sheep, and the caption reads, “I’ve voted Labour all my life, vicar; and fully support their quest for a multicultural society”. Can you believe these sick bastards?

Please don’t label me

I am completely torn over this. The people who brought you the Atheist Bus Campaign are now bringing us a billboard campaign in which a young child asks us ‘Please don’t label me’. The campaign is the shop window for the brash evangelical wing of atheism, the Dawkins–Hitchens tendency.

First of all, the real political issue behind ‘Please don’t label me’ is faith schools. Regardless of a certain moral panic among secularists, the number and popularity of faith schools in the UK have been increasing. This has happened due to a complex network of reasons that are not all that easy to unravel. I want to talk about the political issues around faith schools first, and then the philosophical issues around the labelling of children. I’ve given the two sections under headings below, so you can skip whatever does not interest you.

Last chance to see: save us whities!

BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat programme recently aired an interview (transcript) with three members of the British National Party, leader Nick Griffin and twenty-somethings Mark and Joey.

BNP members Mark and Joey

Radio 1 is a national BBC radio station targeted at young people, and Newsbeat is its news service. BNP is a racist political party, which recently secured two seats in the European Parliament.

Like most other critics I’ve read on this, the issue is not so much that the interview took place, but that the interviewer, Debbie Randle, gave the racists a free run, an open goal.