A storm as big as a hurricane has been provoked by rapper Stormzy. But IS Britain 100% racist?

The frenzy sparked by misquoted comments about racism from grime star Stormzy in the UK shows just how deep in denial so many Britons still are over the scale of Britain’s racist past.

Urban icon Stormzy has them huffing and puffing over the breakfast tables of Britain as the Italian paper La Republica slowly translates into the English tabloids. Some of it has been lost in translation.  

Stormzy didn’t mean that 100% of British people were racists. How could they be?

If they were, Stormzy would be on the roads of Croydon kicking his heels rather than bringing Christmas Day to a close on the BBC, neither would he have headlined Glastonbury or been a judge of prime-time TV on the X Factor. Neither would he now be a multi-millionaire.

He meant that the British state was 100% racist. And that would be 100% true.

The British Empire had racism as its premise. How could it be otherwise?

How else could a small set of islands off the north of Europe justify ruling about a quarter of the landmass and 23 percent of the people on the Earth, not even 100 years ago, if not on the basis of superiority? Racial superiority.

How could a state grow fat and rich on the basis of the systematic looting of human beings from Africa, trafficked in chains on a maritime death march through Liverpool to work in the plantations of the New World (conquered by the Old World) as beasts, chattels, bought and sold like Oxen, other than through organised racism?

Of course, no-one alive today enslaved anyone who looks like Stormzy. But neither has reparation been made. To the contrary, the storm over Stormzy illustrates how deep in denial so many British people are over the sheer murderous scale of Britain’s racist past.

Being half an Irishman myself with an Indonesian wife, five mixed race children and having represented more people of colour in parliament than anyone else in British history, I’m here to tell you that nothing provokes more racism in Britain than telling people they are being racist!

But there’s no denying that, as spun by newspapers, the allegation that Britain is 100% racist is untrue, unfair, and crucially lacking in perspective. 

Especially where the choir join in with a chorus of blame for Brexit.

First, because if you think England is racist, you’ve never lived in France. Or virtually anywhere in the European Union.

Racism in the European Union is at epidemic proportions. The whole Fortress Europe is based upon racism. They don’t even properly fish black people out of the Med any more. Black people and their goods and services are forcibly locked out of what is an overwhelmingly white continent. And Muslim women get arrested for wearing too many clothes on the beach.

Racist chanting by a small number of knuckle-dragging moronic football fans at the Tottenham v Chelsea match last weekend has caused a national paroxysm. That fans of a Tottenham team chock-full of black players could make monkey gestures and noises directed at black Chelsea players just goes to show how deep and how irrational racism is. That the whole thing was sparked by Tottenham’s Korean player kicking a black Chelsea player in the chest just puts the tin-hat on it.

Eighty-one percent of British people are white. I was around when it was much whiter than that. Racial attitudes when there were far fewer people of colour around was a million times worse than it is today. It’s not 100% better now. But it’s headed in the right direction.

Ironically withdrawal from the EU, from whence immigration is a 100% white, will see more, largely Commonwealth black and Asian people in Britain than ever before. The tide has turned. Sing hallelujah.

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