Race

Evening Standard

Game on: APSA London, in green, and Bowers & Pitsea line up in east London. Image courtesy of Evening Standard

Sepp Blatter has probably never seen a match in the Essex Senior League, but if he did it might give him some insight into racism in football.

The match between London APSA and Bowers & Pitsea, just up the road from Upton Park, starts off well.

The match programme has a full-page advertisement: “Let’s kick racism out of football.” And the two teams appear to be doing just that. London APSA, largely Asian, have a white goalkeeper. The visiting team from Basildon have several black players, and the referee is black.

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Evening Standard

The great myth about immigration is that there has never been any proper debate on the issue.

Not true. In the 40 years since I first arrived from India, immigration, like taxes and the royal family, has formed a constant backdrop of national discourse.

I came months after Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. Then, immigration was a codeword for coloured immigration. But, as yesterday’s figures from the Office of National Statistics show, the group showing the largest population increase between 2001 and 2009 were 533,000 “other whites”: east Europeans and people from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This should help us stop seeing the issue as a purely ethnic one.

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The Mail on Sunday

The week before David Cameron proclaimed the death of multiculturalism, my wife and I got lost driving through East London, not far from where the Olympics will be held. I leaned out of the car window to find a sign that was in a language I could not at first recognise. It was certainly not English.

Then I realised it was Bengali, the language of my parents. Although I speak Bengali, I have never been taught the written language.

For a moment, I had the bizarre thought that we had strayed into the east end of Kolkata – and, as in Kolkata, there was also an English sign and we eventually found our way. But that whole episode illustrated the multicultural mess we are in.

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History Today

The Second World War is well established as the classic fight between good and evil. We all know who the goodies were, yet the war saw many people choose to favour the baddies. They argued that they had to do so as the goodies had skeletons in their cupboards that made them not much better than the baddies and sometimes worse. These choices were made largely in Asia by leaders of countries fighting to be free of Western colonial rule. Given the mountain of material the war has inspired, you would expect historians to tackle this subject with some frequency. Yet it has merited little attention, particularly in the West.

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Daily Telegraph

SUNDAY’S Panorama programme presented the wretched spectacle of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, wriggling on a hook of his own making. Asked why he had boycotted the Holocaust Memorial Day but attended the memorial service to Sheikh Yassin, the ideological chief of Hamas and grand justifier of suicide bombing, Sir Iqbal could not answer. He did little better when asked what he would do if Salman Rushdie had published The Satanic Verses now (back then he said that death would be “a bit too easy for him”). His answer was that the upcoming law against religious hatred would see to the book’s withdrawal.

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