>>I meant this semi-seriously - does the Tory party depend on coded
racist appeals the way the GOP does in the US?
Doug<<
They certainly have done in the past. It is a bit more complicated than (my caricature version of) what you get in the USA though.
1. There has historically always been one or two senior figures in the Tory Party blowing the dog whistle on this issue; Norman Tebbit with his "cricket test" (these bloody Paki immigrants mate, are they English? Well who do they cheer for in the cricket, eh? eh?) is the example that sticks in my mind, but obviously Enoch Powell was the ur-example. In general, when they cross the line they have to be dropped but they are always there, sending out the message that if you don't like brown people, the Tories are the party for you.
2. It is complicated however by the fact that because of our location and history, a lot of the energy of potential racists is dissipated in hating the French, Germans, Dutch, etc. We have a reasonably large and lively set of political parties whose raison d'etre is getting us out of the EU, and they can get between 2% and 8% of the national vote depending on whether they have had a meltdown into a zillion grouplets recently. (there are decent principled reasons to be against the EU, but a casual look at the anti-EU movement reveals that this is not the motivating force for most of the people actually in it). This lot have a significant wing of support in the Tory party too, and there is significant crossover between them and the genuine racists.
On the other hand, the Tories got so comprehensively carried out at the last election, based on a truly dreadful dog-whistle-racism campaign designed by Lynton Crosbie (John Howard's political consultant) and based on various slogans about "bogus asylum seekers", that they are for once trying to play the opposite tune; to try to tell the electorate that they are a normal people's party and the racist nutters are no longer welcome. My barometer of whether this is a) sincere and b) working is the support level for the BNP, which is rising and rising. I take this as a *good* sign in UK politics as I think it means that "working class Tories" (an electoral grouping who are given the most bizarrely excessive respect in British politics as a bunch of salt-of-the-earth types who are far more in touch with the real world than trendy leftie middle class socialists, but who nevertheless love their country and their heritage; actually most of them are just nasty little racist fuckers who would have turned coat the minute the first jackboot landed in Dover) have got the message that the game is up. Having the fascists out in the open in an explicitly fascist party with no hope of power is much better than having them hiding in corners of a party that might run asylum policy.
best dd
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