Roaming Charges may apply

UKIP voters are racist clowns. That’s neat and tidy and easy to understand, isn’t it? By the same strain of logic Conservative voters are cruel, fox-hunting, Eton old boys and every Labour voter was born in a mineshaft and suckled by whippets. Aren’t lazy stereotypes useful? No, seriously, aren’t they? We use them all the time: tight Scotsmen, thuggy northerners, smelly Frenchmen, stupid Oirishmen, sex-mad Dutch, Law-mad Swiss, cold, efficient Germans... and thieving gypsy bastards. We use stereotypes in jokes because - get this - they're funny, so long as you don't take them seriously.

In the non-serious, topsy-turvy world of British politics, enslaving ever more of the population to feed and be fed by the state machine is compassionate Labourism, while letting people make their own decisions and keep more of their own earnings is nasty Conservatism. Nobody knows quite where the LibDems stand – seriously; I don’t know, do you? But sod all that, let’s put aside the enormous fundamental dichotomy of state versus individual and problems such as how to fix the economy and let’s instead draw the battle lines around racism.

Except controlling borders isn’t racism at all, is it? Yet that’s what the anti-‘Kippers want you to think. Nobody has ever seriously suggested curtailing the importation of skills. If we need doctors and scientists and engineers because two generations of dire basic education means we have insufficient capability from UK-born stock, then immigration may be the best short-term answer. It may even be an acceptable longer term policy. But unrestricted movement for all? What could possibly go wrong?

Racism is the deliberate marginalisation of people who are not exactly like yourself, preaching hatred of them and in the extreme, taking action against them. What racism isn’t, is preferring to associate with people of your own background, whether that be colour, nationality, language, customs or religion. I wouldn’t be comfortable entering a mosque in exactly the same way I wouldn’t be comfortable joining an evangelical choir. You may be happy doing both of those things and bully for you, but it’s just not my thing. That doesn’t make me a racist. As much as some on the left want it to become a thought crime, preferring the company of kin is just normal.

Mixing is also normal. Britain has always absorbed people from all over the world, many of whom have become as British as anybody else. Similarly we have spread ourselves over the globe, making a living and organically fitting in. Or not; if you don’t fit you eventually move on. Intermingling is not only normal it’s enriching and interesting and exciting. What isn’t normal, however, is Labour’s version of multiculturalism; forcing an indigenous population to not only accept immigration in overwhelming numbers, to not only actively promote segregation of new communities from old, but to render any dissent, any discussion, as racist.

 If it was normal we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune promoting it, legislating for it and educating children that it is. Forcing it down our throat, or as Labour liked to phrase it, rubbing our noses in it, was a policy doomed to backfire. There are some genuine, nasty racists out there, of that there is no doubt, but to label a white-haired old pensioner in the same way because she is bewildered at how all the counter staff and shelf stackers have foreign accents while the local school-leavers are drinking cider in the park is a feat of wilful malevolence only indoctrinated socialists could achieve.

There are costs to rapid mass immigration; we have paid them and will continue to pay. It may take a generation or more to recover our equilibrium. Ed Miliband is reluctantly accepting that now and hoping that a grovelling apology for what they did will make you all forget. But don’t you dare forget and don’t you dare vote for the fools that brought it about. Britain now is far more racist than I can ever remember and certainly more racist than before we needed all that ideological re-education. You might want to take note that we’re also poorer, more divided and less optimistic than at any time since the early nineteen-eighties.

Given that UKIP’s principle aim is to take back the controls that will allow us to rebuild a stable Britain, the racist taunt just looks to me like a lazy, unprincipled way to avoid a serious debate on the way ahead. On this issue at least, it looks to me Like Tony Blair is still in charge.

Ken Clarke - Can I do my Paki joke now?