Outlook The last few weeks have seen the media effort to foment racist sentiments against asylum seekers - particularly Roma - reach unprecedented depths.
While some of the broadsheets have begun to pull back at little in response to criticism from their readership, they too participated fully in the initial phase.
Independent socialist GRAHAM USHER was so furious about these developments that he sent us the following article. THE BRITISH press is at it again - attempting to whip up a crude, racist backlash with the latest in a series of ment in concentration camp- threatening situation were ype centres in Middlesex or Ixfordshire Others await when Margaret Thatcher fre- and other monsters were quently surviving on little recently more than £40 worth of food tea" with Pinochet (a man tokens. who headed a vicious South Diversion American mintary arctatorship which violently overIt is always an casy option democratically to deflect Way elected, leftish government Toi sociauc such in 1973 and is known to have homelessness and the fact that nearly three quarters of sands of its political oppoa million homes currently with the direct stand empty and neglected in connivance of the cratic" USA and its shadowy Instead of focusing on this, unemployment, Now Home poverty, Secretary Jack ("I rated with fanciful claims chat "Refugees are living in regressive beggars") Stran luxury and milking us dry". has decided that the odious Pinochet is "too sick" to face To seize on this example, as the racist tabloid press has extradition or a proper trial! Owners done, and try to make it out as the norm, is as distorted as We should not take lectures from a press which rells us It is also important to point out that, all too often, the us to hear and read, not least hypocritical British capitalsalers in the shape of abour ist system and its olitical also rant on about "Gypsy Spongers" and "Romanian and governments Spongers...begging covertly (and sometimes not building mansions on OUR handouts". regimes that cause people to This is not informed or flee for their lives in the first objective journalism but grossly oversimplified, displace. The same ublications torted and deeply xenophobie trash, as is the bysteria HOW 30541 Algerian family flecing a life surrounding the supposedly Tony Blair and Ramsay MacDonald: both fond of "partership" with employers founded, has very little reason apartheid and the release of serious problem of "aggressive begging".
Fears
It is cynically designed to home in on some of people's most basic fears when in the Among those enlisted to help whip up openly racist working people and is the favourite trade unionist - Kenneth Jackson refuse call him Ken'| general secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Electrical Union (The Sun, March 14)
man currently retailing the tired old chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, semiracist rubbish so beloved of trade UB8UE bureaucrats, especially when claiming speak for the Jackson does not object to the real scandal: that finance is free to roam the globe at will in the search for higher profits, dom of movement is denied especially when the worker has a black SKin This is the reason for divisive and racist immigration controls: and these, like the capitalist system which hreeds them. must be fought! investors. White workers had also benette ton te Domma had been given a monopoly of the masses of non-whites, especially Africans, have not benefited at all from this so-called prosperity... the payment gaps retween black and white annual African income was up to 15 times less than annual white income more and more profit was being squeezed out of cheap black The only solution was equality in pay at all levels -from management to work.
Sounds almost like socialism!