MP: Brexit has unleashed 1930s-style racism in UK
A SPATE of racist incidents in Birmingham shows that the type of prejudice that was commonplace in 1930s Britain has returned, according to a city MP.
Birmingham Erdington MP Jack Dromey (Lab) said his Irish immigrant parents told him stories about the blatant racism they experienced in the UK in the 1930s and 1940s.
And he told the House of Commons he thought that type of prejudice had gone forever – but it has now returned as a result of the behaviour of Brexit campaigners.
But the MP said voters who wanted to leave the European Union were not racist.
Mr Dromey told the House of Commons he believed former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Conservative Boris Johnson, now the Foreign Secretary, were partly to blame.
He said: “I must say that the way that some in the Brexit camp played the race and immigration card in the referendum campaign was nothing short of shameful with, on the one hand, that infamous poster with Nigel Farage, and – dare I say it – on the other hand, the current Foreign Secretary talking about the tens of millions of Turks who might come to our country.
“The consequences have been very serious. There has been a rise in hate crime in my constituency. Poles in Erd- ington High Street have been told, back home.’
“An Afro-Caribbean man who has been here for 40 years was told, ‘Go back home.’ So was a Kashmiri taxi driver who has been here for 35 years.
“An Asian train guard was threatened by a large aggressive white man. The guard was shutting the doors when the man told him to hang on because his mates were five minutes away. The guard said that the train had to go. “The white man pointed his finger an inch from the guard’s nose and said, ‘Oh no you don’t. We make the rules now’.”
Mr Dromey said the incidents were an echo of the treatment his parents received when they arrived in the UK in the 1930s.
“I thought that that kind of brutish behaviour was something of the past. My dad came from County Cork to dig roads, and my mother came from Tipperary to train as a nurse.
“I was 13-years-old when my dad told me for the first time – and I could not believe this, because I adored him, but he could not look me in the eyes, and was looking down at the floor – about what it was like, when he arrived, looking for lodging houses in Kilburn and Cricklewood and seeing those infamous signs: ‘No dogs. No Irish.’
“I thought that we had fundamentally changed as a country, but this country has been scarred by the way the referendum campaign was conducted.” ‘Go