Boris for Mayor. Or Ken. Who cares!!!

It looks like it may actually be an election that makes us laugh, smile, cry or cheer. The race for The Mayoral seat in London has begin, all be it as a trailer for the real thing. Opinion polls, these wonderfully reliable gauges of public opinion actually had Boris ahead in one. How exciting is that! A blip? A trend? Who knows. In a sense, who cares because ultimately only one vote will count. What we lovingly call democracy will have its way and one candidate will rise above the rest to be duly elected. Democracy, the suppressing of the minority by the majority. Oh how cynical of me.

But not half as cynical as Dawn Butler and Diane Abbott, Labour MPs for Brent South and Hackney North respectively. They already have played the “race” card. And all because Boris, in his inimitable fashion, used some rather quaint phrases. By no stretch of the imagination could they be called racist phrases. That is unless you see racism in every corner. (Just don’t ask for black tea!)

I recall not so long ago sitting on a Government committee on ethnic businesses and the need to integrate them into the “main stream”. On the evidence presented to us, one of the key issues for the particular community we were looking at was the lack of ability to speak English by a fair number of the business owners.

Now, if you are like me, you seek solutions to problems. The logical solution to me was to get the Home Office to fund a pilot programme to give intensive support to these businesses in the form of English language courses, all paid for by us the tax payer. It would at one stroke have given the poor English speakers an open door to the whole UK economy.

Sensible? Oh no it wasn’t! One chap nearly jumped over the table at me and shouted in my face that I was “a racist”! “They”, (he was referring to the largely European business community that existed in that particular part of town), “have to come to us and understand us”. Incidentally, it was at that series of meetings that I first realised the extent of the “race” industry. On many fronts, it wasn’t about getting equality. It was about getting separate development. Openly talked about were different accounting systems, different legal systems for businesses, different education systems for the children, different banking laws. I think in South Africa they called that apartheid. And there was me thinking that the UK was becoming a melting pot for all cultures and creeds. It was revealed to be far from it and getting further from it as the years go by. What different worlds we lived in.

So Butler and Abbot may, like my friend on the committee who introduced his own rather objectionable defination of what racisim is, be in danger of themselves introducing racism in to the debate by effectively saying that they are the judges of what language is racist and what is not.

Frankly, I think the people of London are too sensible to listen to such strident nonsense from these two.