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PC 2322 David Blun-kkk-ett MP

BBC1’s Secret Policeman, 21/10/ 03, tells viewers little they already did not know about police attitude to race, especially Asians and Blacks.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, tried to ban the programme. He failed. He then badmouthed it, calling it a “stunt”.

Tony Blair’s Home Secretary was reacting to a programme that exposed racism within British police forces. Blunkett’s reaction was part of Blair’s strategy to win the support of a PC Rob Pulling type voter: “the angry young white man”. Blunkett plays a key role in Blair’s strategy. He is Blair’s PC 2322 Rob Pulling.

PC 2322 Rob Pulling was one of the police cadets whose racism the Secret Policeman exposed. PC Pulling believes Hitler had the “right idea”. Had he been successful, his plan to rid Germany of Jews could have been the “blue print” for Britain gassing of “Pakis”.

None the less PC Pulling is convinced that if Britain is to solve its ethnic minority problem, a final solution can only be found by adopting special measures. He said: “[Whites] need to do some dirty work. Without some dirty work, it’s not going to happen. We also need to do it legitimately.”

He is willing to put into practice what he believes. But he accepts there are limits to what he can do “legitimately”. “I’ll go as far as I could get away with it; if I could get away with killing a Paki and burying him under a track, I would”, he said.

PC Pulling accepts he is a racist. He claims he is not alone in holding such beliefs. He said, “I am not out of place. I am not one in a million. I am the majority.”

David Blunkett believes he speaks for “the majority”. According to him, his is the voice of the voiceless white working class frustrated by crime and illegal economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers (1). A Guardian editorial describes him as being “proud of his working-class roots and more than ready to represent poor, marginalized white people” (2).

Blunkett has no time for the “woolly minded, liberal-minded brigade” (3); people whom PC Rob Pulling calls “yellow bellies” politically correct liberals.

He does not allow political correctness to frustrate Blair’s strategy; “…his choice of populist language is absolutely deliberate and for a purpose” (4). That purpose is to win the angry young white man away from the appeal of the far-Right. This Blunkett argues he can only do so by addressing the same issues as BNP does: white people’s hatred of Asian, Blacks and asylum seekers. In other word, he plays the race card in order to out race the racist BNP.

Hugo Young argues that to play the race card means to express anti-black and/or anti-Asian sentiments in “sneaky ways to legitimise such sentiments among white voters” (5).

Nick Cohen, another columnists, criticises Blunkett for using fear of the far-Right as a pretext for demonising ethnic minorities. Cohen rightly suspects Blunkett “has been raising the phantom menace of the far-Right … as political cover for policies he would push for if the BNP didn’t exist” (6). Such policies are especially populist when they centre on Asians culture and religion.

Blunkett believes Asian culture conflicts with British culture: a clash of civilisation. In 2001, he warned, “[Asians] who have come in to our home – for that is what it is- should accept [our] norms just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere” (7). The implication is British-born Asians are not British if they retain their culture. This chimes well with PC Pulling’s racist sketch of British-born Pakistanis: “A dog born in a barn is still a dog; a Paki born in Britain is a f***ing Paki. ”

Blunkett distinguishes himself from PC Pulling by insisting Asians adopt British “norms of acceptability”. They should speak English at home rather their mother tongue. Muslim teachers should conduct their services in English (8).

He is not afraid to subject Muslims to the “unthinkable”: in July 2002, he ordered riot police, accompanied by the media, to raid a mosque and seize a couple seeking refuge from deportation.

Asians should marry British-born spouses rather than partners from the Indian subcontinent, Blunkett insists (9). He conflates the involuntary practice of “forced marriage” with voluntary “arranged marriage”, which he calls a “medieval” practice (10).

No one hears Blunkett insists British-born whites marry spouses solely from these shores. He makes no prescriptions for German parents, living in Britain, that they should speak English with their children at home so as to avoid a schizophrenic “generational relationship” (11). The Catholic Church receives no bulls from him on conducting mass in English rather than Latin.

Historically, synagogues were the last places of worship and refuge to be raid by police dressed in “military” gear.

Expulsion of naturalised citizens, as practised in pre-war Europe, is now one of the “unthinkable” things New Labour finds politically expedient to do in order to appease BNP voters.

Blunkett is not the first Labour Home Secretary to pander to the far-Right by doing the “unthinkable”. In the 1979, Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, forced Hindu fiancées to undergo medical examination to see if each were a “bona fide virgin”. Male doctors performed virginity tests on women entering Britain from India to marry Asian British nationals or residents. If a woman was not “virgo intacto”, immigration officers assumed she was not a “bona fide” fiancée (12).

Unlike PC Pulling, Blunkett is a sneaky politician. He does not openly equate each and every Pakistani with a dog. Non the less, Inayat Bunglawala, Muslim Council spokesman, equates Blunkett’s comments on Asians to a form of “Paki-bashing” (13). Such bouts of “Paki bashing” have become predictable and more gratuitous.

The result of Blunkett’s “Paki-bashing” is devastating for Pakistanis and other ethnic minorities. According to Scotland Yard, “racist attacks soar each time a politician makes a speech on race and immigration” (14). Three random examples reinforce the point.

On September 15, 2001, Haniddullah Aharwal, a 28-year-old Afghani taxi driver was kicked, punched and stabbed by three white assailants in Twickenham, west London. He was left paralysed from the neck down (15).

On August 28, 2002, a 28-year-old Iranian asylum seeker, Tayman Bahmani, was stabbed to death in Peel Street, Sunderland. He had fled Iran for fear of his life to Britain two years earlier. Police considered Tayman murder to be racially motivated. His death came at the end of a sustained period of verbal attacks on asylum seekers by Blunkett (16).

A similar period of “Paki bashing” by Blunkett culminated in a Muslim corpse being defiled. On January 17, 2003, 65-year-old Habiba Mohammed’s body was found, by her family, with rashers of bacon place on her in a mortuary at the Hillingdon hospital in north west London (17).

The desecration of the Muslim corpse and the stress caused to her family were the “norms of acceptability” which Blunkett find politically advantageous to impose on Asians, Blacks and asylum seekers in order to win the votes of the PC Pullings.

Blair’s strategy, spearheaded by Blunkett, is to win the votes of the white working class “ready to embrace the far-Right”. PC 2322 Rob Pulling is representative of this New Labour constructed stereotype: the angry young white man, haters of Asians, Blacks and asylum seekers.

John Denham, the former office minister, believes the hysteria about asylum seekers has lowered the barrier on expressing racist language (18). By speaking about Asians and asylum seekers in PC Pulling’s language and penalising them, Blunkett bridges the ideological ‘gap’ between the far-Right and New Labour. Consequently, he endorses BNP’s racism. Nick Griffin, BNP leader, agrees: “The asylum-seeker issue has been great for us. This is legitimates us” (19).

That legitimacy manifests itself increase in racial attacks, use of blatant racist language, BNP electoral success as well as increased racist policing.

Blunkett, “the hard man of the Right” (20), in trying to ban the Secret Policeman was only acting to further Blair’s strategy of appeasing racists rather than confront them.

The Secret Policeman in exposing police racism exposed Blair’s racism. David Blunkett MP should follow PC 2322 Rob Pulling’s example and resign as Home Secretary. In PC Pulling speak: Blunkett is a f***ing racist, mate.

Source:-

(1) The Guardian 30/09/03

(2) The Guardian 7/09/02

(3) The Guardian 9/09/02

(4) The Guardian 30/09/02

(5) The Guardian 19/12/00

(6) The Observer, 13/10/02

(7) The Guardian 19/02/02.

(8) The Times 31/10/03

(9) The Guardian 8/02/02

(10) The Times 1/06/02

(11) The Guardian 16/09/02

(12) The Guardian 1/02/1979

(13) The Times 31/10/03

(14) The Observer 22/04/01

(15) BBC News 17/09/01

(16) Blink 30/08/02

(17) BBC News 17/04/03

(18) The Guardian 23/10/03

(19) The Observer 13/10/02

(20) The Telegraph 6/09/02