With tomorrow's elections and the feared success for the BNP it is worth thinking about how we might really get to grips with the underlying causes of racism. New Labour has for far too long colluded with Migration Watch and the the Red Top newspapers to blame racist attitudes on immigrants or immigration (Blame the victim - it is always popular!). This is of course because they refuse to take the radical steps to attack poverty and inequality which are the real predictors of racist attitudes. The rise in racism and support for the BNP mirrors the degree to which the Labour party and the wider labour movement has neglected or even betrayed its base by promoting inequality at both extremes of the spectrum - rich and poor. In a brilliant letter to the Guardian in January (5/1/09) Professor Peter Latchford shows how the terms in which we talk about racism often set it out in ways that actually "perpetuate the divisions between groups of people." We tend to "focus on semantic niceties, rather than on the deep rooted fundamentals". The rest of his letter bears being quoted in full:
"We do know this: that being poor is a better predictor of negative attitudes to other groups - including other races - than is being white (or black, or Asian). We know that people who feel unable to influence things in their area are more likely to feel resentful towards people they see as being different from themselves. We know that people who live among, and have friends from, different backgrounds are more likely to feel that society is cohesive. There may well be an issue with the disempowered, isolated and impoverished white working class and their attitudes to immigration, race and integration. But the facts are clear: the cause of the issue is not whiteness, or even immigration - the real challenge to a cohesive society is disempowerment, isolation and impoverishment as experienced by any ethnic group.
To describe the issue as "white working class" may be a necessarily emotive media and political device, but it runs the risk of perpetuating one key myth: the myth that breakdowns in cohesion result principally from differences between races."

Not only is this bang on the money but notice he has said such an important thing without any recourse to the blancmange term "community". Whereas alot of the communitarians (Young, Putnam etc) who love nothing better than to blame the victim would have used the word community in at least two conflicting ways here: the geographical sense - for the "areas" in which people live and the population group ("backgrounds") that they are defined as coming from.

It is worth noting again that community is a word that is seldom used to describe middle class areas or population groups. It is usually used as a subtle way of "othering" particular groups. Frida Pinto the star of Slumdog Millionaires makes this quite clear when talking about her native Mumbai society. "We don't call them slums we call them communities" she says.