racists in glass houses

It is with some pride that this is my england considers the list of people who have seen fit to block this blog's incarnation on Twitter. The list includes:

• Louise Mensch, the ambitious Tory MP who will say literally anything to defend Murdoch and co.
• Nadine Dorries, the working-class Liverpudlian Tory MP who finds herself the victim of her own party leader's snobbery and scorn, and who is perhaps best known for her contention that girls but not boys should be taught the benefits of sexual abstinence.
• Guido Fawkes, the online persona of the more prosaically named Paul Staines, a seedy-looking blogger (with an equally dishevelled-looking junior sidekick) known for screaming "fucking cunt" at people who disrupt his zany stunts.
• Grace Dent, a TV critic who rounded on a fellow Twitter user for making unkind remarks about her without realising that she was a client of the PR firm for which he was working (that's one version of events... there are others).

Building on this success, this is my england has joined the shit list of one more public figure in the last couple of days - none other than Nick Griffin, the buffoon presiding over the modernisation of far right British National Party. Modernisation in this case means leading into oblivion.

any slur will do
Looking around for a tawdry populist cause, Griffin's dwindling mob have decided to exploit the public concern around the organised sexual abuse of vulnerable and troubled young white girls badly let down by a system of care homes and social workers. Don't imagine for one moment that the BNP would be interested in these unfortunate children if their abusers had also been white. But because the nine men convicted for offences committed in the Rochdale area were all Asian and all, nominally, Muslims, Griffin's people are buzzing around the bad smell of this sorry affair like flies circling a dustbin.

This, then, is the context of a tweet which Griffin wrote over the weekend: 

pogrom wannabes

Note the first word. Paedostani. A portmanteau term originally coined either by Griffin himself or by one of his ideological fellow travellers. Paedophile + Pakistani. Geddit?

Racist bloggers love this word and use it at every opportunity. Such is their desire to remove from these shores not only Pakistan-born people but also British-born UK citizens of Pakistani origin, that they are prepared to peddle an obviously deceitful notion. They want you to conflate the notions of paedophilia and Pakistani culture to the point where you see them as seamless, as one being synonymous with the other. They want you to believe that every Pakistani man or British Pakistani man is looking for an opportunity to get away with the sexual abuse of white children. They want you to view with suspicion the perfectly respectable guy driving the mini-cab that took you home from a night out. They want you to hate and fear the hard-working bloke who runs your local convenience store. They want you to loathe the GP who's been serving your community for decades. They want you to despise England cricketers such as Sajid Mahmood and Ajmal Shahzad. They'd like you to detest Amir Khan, the youngest ever British boxing Olympic medallist. They want you to hate former QPR and Fulham defender Zesh Rehman. They don't really mind how they get you feeling antipathetic towards your countrymen who happen to have Pakistani roots. Any story will do. Right now it's about organised child abuse. Next year it could be something else.

This is reminiscent of the blood libel, a false claim made against Jews in Europe from around the 12th century onwards. This concerns the idea that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood in certain aspects of their religious observance such as the baking of matzos for Passover. As recently as 1946, the promotion of this poisonous idea led to the murder of around forty Jews in the Polish city of Kielce.

why Griffin & co. can't win

It is doubtful that Griffin's goons will manage to whip up a full-blown pogrom in Rochdale or some other place where child abusers of Pakistani origin are identified. Sure, the economy is in poor shape and perhaps a growing percentage of the population is receptive to ideas around immigration and multiculturalism being very serious problems for this country. But we are in nothing like as dark a state as Poland was immediately after the Second World War. 'Liberated' from Hitler only to be tossed into the jaws of Stalin, the central European country was traumatised. With regard to the Kielce pogrom, there is now general agreement among historians that the massacre was instigated by Soviet-sponsored security forces, quite possibly for propaganda purposes, namely to discredit the Polish people and thereby justify totalitarian control over their unfortunate country. This is not to rubbish the idea that there could have been a sufficient store of existing anti-semitic feeling among the townspeople of Kielce to keep the fire blazing once ignited by communist agents provocateurs. Conditions at the time were hardly conducive to sustaining an atmosphere of tolerance. The United Kingdom in the year 2012 looks a much sunnier place in comparison. 

But just because Griffin and his ilk will not succeed in provoking actual massacres on our streets, this does not mean that they would not relish such an outcome were they to have any realistic prospect of making it come to pass. So keep this in mind when tempted to dismiss the BNP's nastiness as small beer. Given half a chance, this lot would delight in whipping up their own version of Kristallnacht or worse.

getting blocked by Griffin

Back to Griffin's tweet. It's not obvious whether the shop he refers to is one owned by someone actually suspected of being a child abuser, accused of being a child abuser or proven to be a child abuser. Maybe so. If not, his use of the term Paedostani is particularly egregious. Because if he is simply referring to a shop owned by a Pakistani person about whom no such allegations have been made, he is stating very plainly a belief that ALL Pakistani men are paedophiles. Consider this possibility the next time that a BNP spokesman attempts to position the party's beliefs as somehow not being extremist or offensive.

This question, though, about the identity of the shopkeeper mentioned by Griffin is not one that can be pursued by this is my england. Not now the BNP leader has blocked this blog's Twitter account.

So what made Griffin block our account? What could we possibly have said to get through the thick skin of the veteran controversialist? Well, this is the tweet that seems to be to blame:

Who are the gents mentioned here?

Nigel Hesmondlalgh is an Accrington-based BNP supporter who started a nine-month prison sentence in January this year for possessing child pornography. Darren Francis is a Northampton-based BNP activist and convicted paedophile, jailed for preying on a girl of thirteen. Ian Hindle and Andrew Wells are the Blackburn BNP members jailed in 2008 for sexual activity with fourteen-year old girls. It seems that Nick Griffin did not enjoy being reminded about these chaps. But we could have gone further...

Tweets, as you doubtless know, have to be kept short. So there was no space to mention Mark Walker, the County Durham teacher and BNP member who seems to have lost his job partly because of inappropriate contact with a teenage former pupil. It was also impossible to name check Roderick Rowley, the former BNP candidate in Coventry who was convicted of producing and distributing obscene images of children.

paedostanis vs. BNPaedophiles

In the wake of the child abuse case in Rochdale, there has been some debate about whether the perpetrators' ethnic and religious background was a factor. Further, there has even been discussion around whether it is acceptable to raise this question. One suggestion is that a squeamishness about this point - i.e. a fear on the part of police of being accused of racism - meant that these offences went on unpunished for as much as ten years. This clearly needs to be investigated properly, and we must be alive to the possibility that this particular form of organised abuse is more prevalent in Pakistani communities than across the wider population. Surely this must be properly understood if future occurrences of this type are to be prevented.

This is sure to be an uncomfortable line of enquiry. But whatever the findings, we can be sure of one thing. There will be no evidence to support the clearly ludicrous notion that ALL Pakistani men are predisposed to the sexual abuse of children, be they vulnerable white children or children from within their own community. So the vile neologism Paedostani will never be a word used in legitimate debate about this issue.

To anyone who wants to use this word, however, let's offer the following rough statistical analysis. If, on the basis of the number of child abuse cases involving people of Pakistani origin, of which there are around 800,000 in the UK, you feel that Paedostani is a legitimate term to use, you must also accept the legitimacy of a new word we'll coin here today: BNPaedophile. You will accept the use of this term because of how easy it has been to find online six documented cases of BNP members who are child abusers. After all, the BNP only has around 4,000 members so it would appear to be the case that paedophilia is more prevalent among the party's membership than it is in the general population.

Racists in glass houses, it seems, are throwing stones when seeking to conflate Pakistani ethnicity with a predilection for abusing children.