From Nick Cohen’s Pretty Straight Guys
Clinton’s “reality therapy” begain in 1980 when he was governor of Arkansas, a state in the old Confederacy. Cuban refugees being held in an Arkansas lock-up rioted, and the pictures of a racial struggle between white policemen and brown-skinned aliens helped lose Clinton the governorship. Bill and Hillary plotted what was to be a successful return to power and resolved “never to be out-negatived again”. Christopher Hitchens, Clinton’s best and least sympathetic biographer, says that the origins of the “out-negatived” phrase were familiar to everyone who knew the politics of the South. When George Wallace lost the state of Alabama to a more nakedly racist opponent he swore in public that he would “never be outniggered again”.
And so, with weary inevitability, New Labour meet Michael Howard’s pronouncement on immigration not with charges of stirring up racism, or declaring such spewings hypocritical coming from a man whose father fled Romania in 1939 to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. No, never knowingly out-flanked on the right (to paraphrase George Wallace), Labour rebutted Howard’s advertisement in the Telegraph by attacking him over how he would pay for his plans. Not that the plans are racist or they might prevent genuine asylum seekers reaching the UK. Or for that matter, seeing as immigrants provide a net gain to the British economy, that immigrants should be welcomed.
No, New Labour refuted the advert because they say the plans aren’t costed properly.
Welcome to grey, dismal, unwelcoming Little England.
