Official racism

A questionnaire issued by all NHS Trusts to all outpatients declares: "We all belong to an Ethnic Group". That is racist on its face. It then asks patients to select which of the following groups best describes them, in order to "make sure that we comply with Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000". There follows a jaw-droppingly detailed list. Note the order of the list and the use of upper case letters:

• White British
• White Irish (as opposed to "Black" Irish?)
• Any other White background
• Mixed White and Black Caribbean
• White and Black African
• White and Asian
• Any other mixed background
• British Asian or Asian Indian [as opposed to Red Indians?]
• British Asian or Asian Pakistani [?]
• British Asian or Asian Bangladeshi [?]
• British Asian or Asian Any other Asian background [?]
• British Black or Black Caribbean
• British Black or Black African
• British Black or Black Any other Black background [?]
• Chinese [what, no British Chinese or Chinese Any other Asian background?]
• Any other ethnic group

There is only one possible reason for this questionnaire, and that is to produce the kind of statistics today's Sunday Times has turned into a story titled "Births reveal Britain's ethnic fault lines", provocatively headed with pictures contrasting a blonde white mother and child, and a black burqa-clad female who does not even appear to be pregnant. 

The pie-chart of mothers giving birth in the NHS divided up into ethnic groups as per the questionnaire shows 70 percent to be white, yet the story leads with "fewer than one in 10 mothers is (sic) of white British origin in some parts of Britain". Furthermore, "the average birth rate among British mothers now works out at 1.7 children. For Pakistanis and Bangladeshis it is about three".

How can this sort of crap serve anything other than the race hustling industry, with a side-line in provoking racial antagonism? But of course, how silly of me: without racial antagonism, there would be no need for the race hustling industry.

Years from now we will probably discover that NuLabour's unlimited immigration policy, and the privileging of immigrants over the domestic population, was designed to provoke something like the BNP, so that the NuLabour pukes could pose as anti-Fascists, the last rag of ideological continuity they could claim with the old and, however overtaken by history, genuinely idealistic Labour party.

P.S. See this frantic piece of 30s lefty revivalism with reference to my last paragraph.