sunny Jim

my gorge rose this morning when I unwittingly clicked on an article you can read for yourself here.  It is written by a creature called Leo McKinstry, who is from Northern Ireland and who once worked for Harriet Harman, going on to diss her publicly aftewards.  Nice fellow.  Anyway, he says that people who say that Jim Callaghan was the worst prime minister ever (do they say that?) are all wrong, because the late Jim was a decent bloke, who was against "coloured people" immgrating into the UK.  Now, I don't remember him saying that.  If he did, a veil was mercifully drawn over it.  But even in the 1970s such views had begun to be disapproved of by decent folk everywhere.  McKinstry goes on to attack "Blair and Brown" who, he says, forced "the dogma of multiculturalism" down the throats of good British yeomen.  May I point out to the frothing Ulsterman that, if there ever was a "dogma of multiculturalism", it had its heyday in the late 1980s and early 90s in local authorities.  Under a Conservative government. I was a member of one such in Reading.  It very nearly allowed mother-tongue teaching in schools, it did arrange for halal meat to be served in some schools, its premises were used for an anti-Salman Rushdie rally, and one of its parks for a Hizb ut-Tahrir event.  That was multiculturalism, and it created and sustained ghettoes, and supported the isolation and oppression of women, with encouragement from white local politicians, some of whom do so to this day.  The Blair government took very much against such things.  Rightly.  I don't know what the Brown government thought, and I don't much care.  Managed decline not being my favourite scene.

Mr McKinstry, you get paid, presumably, for your hateful and ill-informed spoutings.  I wasn't much of a fan of the late Jim Callaghan, finding him crass and out of touch.  But I wonder what  his family, and those who knew him best, think of him being prayed in aid for the cause of racial hatred.  Pin-up boy for the BNP?  I very much doubt it.