Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England. Nick Cohen

untutored might think it the job of government to promote common citizenship. Yet in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed, not all the unemployed, for disadvantaged Asians or Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged. Across the country, wherever the BNP makes gains, you can guarantee it has been the beneficiary of white anger at grants and services dispensed on communalist lines.

      State-sponsored sectarianism is about to take off. We are to have religions redefined as races, which they are not, and opposition to religion redefined as race hatred, which it is not. Meanwhile, Labour promises more faith schools that will segregate children and their parents by religion and race and, indeed, class in the case of top-end church schools.

      I can see no more urgent task than taking the fight to those on the right and the left who are busily piling bricks on ghetto walls. If they are not stopped, I do not like to think what Handsworth or the rest of the country will be like in another twenty years.

      Observer, October 2005

* It didn’t, of course.

       Ryanair Migrants

      IF THE BNP had a camera crew, it could not have produced a more revolting depiction of immigrant life in London than David Cronenberg’s film Eastern Promises. It starts as it means to go on with a Kurdish barber forcing his son to cut a customer’s throat. A pregnant Russian child prostitute then dies having a Caesarean. Anna, a naive midwife at the hospital, resolves to find the newborn child’s father. The trail leads to a Russian restaurant. The apparently avuncular proprietor does not only bring exotic foods to grateful Londoners, he is also a people trafficker, who holds girls in sex slavery—and has a psychopath for a son, for good measure.