Ukip: this rhetoric has repercussions

Yesterday, I witnessed a horrible act of racism. At a bus stop, a well dressed and well spoken man started literally screaming in the faces of a family of tourists how much he hated foreigners, how they were freeloaders and how they should go back where they came from.

It was horrible. I haven’t seen anything like it in a very, very long time – and certainly not in London. I felt like I had stepped back in time to the 70s. To a time of National Front marches and the Black and White Minstrel Show. I was incredibly shaken.

As myself and another man confronted this bigoted bully, his constant refrain in his “defence” was “I’m not PC”. He wore his political incorrectness like a badge of honour. A bade that for him made screaming obscenities at a group of strangers (including a young child) not just acceptable, not just morally defensibly, but in his warped world view, he was on the right side.

Yes, this was an isolated incident and perhaps I shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from it. But it’s very hard not to. Especially when the figures show that racism is far from marginalised. The EDL may be the extreme, but if one on three of us are admitting to prejudice, the stain of racism is still strongly at work on our shores.

It can hardly come as a surprise that the racists have become so emboldened. For a while there, overt racism used to be something that if you did feel it, you at least knew well enough how utterly socially unacceptable it is and kept it to yourself. Now with the sustained attack on all things PC (how dare people ask you to be polite! It’s against your freedom of whotsit, innit!) anti-racist campaigners are experiencing the same backlash as feminists have been feeling for years.

As we re-immerse our culture in racist language and fear of foreigners, as we kowtow to UKIP and all join the arms race to be “Tough” on immigration, as we have newspaper headlines about “hidden migrants” meaning the perfectly legal UK born children of immigrants, as we elect MP after MP from a Party whose leader’s dog whistles on everything from Romanian Immigrants to  Child Sex Abuse Scandals are barely hidden.

UKIP are a response to a lot of different powerful political forces. Some of them are the fault of the established political parties for not taking the public with them, not listening enough to their concerns and relying too much on short term politicking and not enough on building long term consensus. We deserve some of this backlash because we have brought it on ourselves. But while we might feel the electoral pain, it is not Ed Miliband, David Cameron or Nick Clegg who will suffer directly from this denigrated culture. It is people like the family at that bus stop who are on the sharp end of the racists new found confidence.

UKIP might be an ever so exciting political phenomenon for political journalists tired of the same old same old to cover. And Farage is clever enough to play the journalists game, leading them just as far as the cliff edge, but refusing to be the one who jumps. That’s for the guy at the bus stop. The kids spray painting mosques and synagogues. Farage can’t be held responsible – oh no!

But the constant wall-to-wall all Farage, all the time coverage is fuelling this rise in the acceptability of saying the unacceptable. Our broadcasters – particularly the BBC – have a responsibility to enjoy the ride a little less and challenge a little more.

What happened yesterday was just one incident. But it felt like so much more. Such open, overt hostility on the streets can never, ever again be allowed to go unchallenged. Nor can the culture that enables it.

Enough of the “tough” rhetoric. Enough of the dog whistles and kowtowing on migrant benefits. Enough of the enabling. We need to be the Party of positive, not the party that tries to use slightly better concealed dog whistles. Or we too are part of the problem. We too are responsible for what happened to that family. And I won’t have that.