Will their vile skinhead poster tip the see-saw against Remain?

The elite view ethnic minorities as a client class to be manipulated

JUST imagine the furious reaction if Vote Leave unveiled a poster campaign featuring a burly North African migrant menacing a sweet Miss Marple lookalike in an English park. The outraged howls of ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ would be deafening, as everyone from the Prime Minister to the Archbishop of Canterbury queued up to condemn it.

Within hours the police would be involved, launching a full- scale investigation into complaints that those responsible were guilty of inciting racial hatred.

And rightly so, many of you might well conclude. The EU referendum battle has already plumbed the depths, with lurid language about Hitler, World War III and genocide.

Using grotesque racial stereotypes to scare white people is as despicable as it is desperate. This type of rabid propaganda has no place in an advanced democracy.

So what’s the difference between this hypothetical Vote Leave advert and the genuine poster campaign wheeled out by Operation Black Vote, which is led by a member of the Remain camp?

It features two people sitting face-to-face on a see-saw. One is an elderly Asian woman in a sari; the other a tattooed white skinhead jabbing his finger aggressively and snarling in her direction. The poster is going up on 37 digital billboards in London and Manchester in the run-up to polling day.

The justification for this demagogic imagery is that it is designed to encourage members of ethnic minorities to vote in the referendum and counter the ‘demonisation of foreigners and people of colour’ by the Leave campaign.

But the clear, not even subliminal or subtle, implication is that those who want to get out of the EU are all knuckle-scraping BNP bootboys brimming with hatred for non-whites.

The ad has been described variously as ‘deplorable’ and ‘repugnant’, both of which I’d agree with. But I’d hesitate before calling it ‘racist’ — not because it isn’t, but because screaming ‘ racist’ is, to borrow from Dr Johnson, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Falsely alleging racism is the default position of the Left whenever they want to demonise an opponent or shut down debate.

So it was no surprise to discover that Operation Black Vote is bankrolled by two impeccably Left-wing charities — the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation — run by pillars of the pro-EU ‘liberal’ establishment.

Encouraging members of ethnic minorities to register to vote is a laudable aim. But this kind of vile, fear-inducing, hate-mongering is way beyond the remit of what is supposed to be a responsible charitable organisation.

YES, there are legitimate concerns about the scale of immigration, which we can’t control while we remain members of the EU. Only yesterday we learned that the net influx from Europe is up yet again and the population of England alone is forecast to increase by at least four million over the next eight years.

But, unless I’ve missed something, I can’t say I’ve noticed the Leavers resorting to ‘demonisation of foreigners and people of colour’.

If there’s any demonising going on here, it’s down to Operation Black Vote, its director Simon Woolley and its advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi London.

The white thug on the poster is straight from central casting, complete with dangling braces, half-mast denims and cherry red Doc Martens bovver boots. He looks as if he’s stepped off the cover of the Skinhead Moonstomp LP, circa 1970.

The last time I saw anyone dressed like that was during the brief skinhead revival in the early Eighties. These days, proper skins are about as rare as genuine Teddy Boys.

You’re more likely to come across skinheads in Eastern Europe, where the Far-Right is in the ascendant. That’s why so many people from Britain’s ethnic minority communities are wary of unrestricted immigration from the Continent.

They see the rise of neo-fascist parties everywhere from Greece to Austria and France and conclude that maybe they’re better off outside the EU.

Tory MP and Out campaigner Priti Patel is horrified at being lumped in with Aryan supremacists by an outfit which claims to speak for minorities. I shouldn’t have thought her Leave colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng and Adam Afriyie are too thrilled, either.

I can only rely on anecdotal evidence, because I don’t trust the polls, but when it comes to the EU, the views of blacks and Asians don’t seem to be much different to the majority white population.

Those who run their own businesses deplore the burden of bureaucracy and regulation, which they have to obey even though they don’t trade with anyone in Europe.

Many resent the fact that while EU citizens from former Communist states are free to settle in Britain, would-be immigrants from the old Commonwealth find insurmountable barriers placed in their way.

As I’ve argued before, settled migrant communities, established for decades, are now faced with disruption and displacement by recent arrivals from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

They are confronted with the same kind of culture shock as the Londoners featured in this week’s BBC TV documentary Last Whites Of The East End, which focused on the startling transformation of the Borough of Newham over the past 15 years.

Once a staunchly white workingclass area, most of the traditional residents have upped sticks to Essex. There are now 143 languages spoken in Newham.

My late father grew up round the corner from West Ham football ground and we scattered his ashes in the nearby City of London cemetery. So I go back there a couple of times a year and have seen with my own eyes the way in which the borough has changed beyond recognition.

This important programme was well-balanced and gave voice to ordinary working- class people usually denied a platform on TV.

Despite the ludicrous knee-jerk claims of the brain-dead Twitterati, there was no racism on display, just folk who now felt with justification like strangers on the streets where their families had lived for generations.

The East End has always been a melting pot. One of the main characters in Last Whites was a bus driver called Tony who had a Jamaican dad and an English mum and is married to a Romanian girl.

He lamented the fact that local schools no longer celebrate Christmas because the dominant culture is Muslim and simply expressed a wish for his daughter to grow up in the kind of society he had.

The problem isn’t immigration itself, it’s the sheer scale of numbers and the rapid pace at which it has happened.

I watched the interviews with a mixture of curiosity, sadness and not a little anger. In a parallel universe, that could have been me, if my family had never moved away.

What was missing from this excellent programme was any attempt to question those responsible.

I don’t blame anyone for moving here in search of a better life, but I’d like to know exactly how this enforced mass immigration is supposed to have benefited the indigenous East End population?

WHERE were the interviews with the politicians who decided to tear up our border controls? Could someone explain to locals like Tony why they should ‘celebrate’ the ‘diversity’ which had been foisted upon them?

Perhaps we could have heard from distinguished representatives of the Rowntree Trust or the Esmee Wossname Foundation about the desirability of turning a traditional London borough into a Tower of Babel, destroying community cohesion in the process and driving people from homes they have lived in since they were born.

But you never get a straight answer, just noisy accusations of ‘racism’ if you dare to challenge their cosy consensus.

Of course, the ivory tower politicians and posturing panjandrums of the Lady Bountiful sector never have to live with the consequences of their policies and pronouncements. Far easier to divide and rule and sneer at the ‘Little Englanders’ who beg to differ.

They certainly don’t celebrate diversity of opinion. That’s why anyone who disagrees with them has to be vilified.

The cartoon skinhead on the Operation Black Vote poster tells you everything you need to know. The ‘elite’ look on ethnic minorities as a lumpen client class to be patronised and manipulated, in this case by scaring them into voting Remain.

Let’s hope people not yet on the electoral roll do take notice and register in time for the referendum.

And then Vote Leave.