Daily Mail race obsession gets worse

Are you British but not white? The issue is really bothering the Daily Mail.

The right-wing rag is widely known for its routine pieces on "Britain to become mega overcrowded by 2030/2040/2050 [select year at random]", "migrants rob jobs and steal packed lunches" and "'too many immigrants' warns objective anti-immigration think tank", generally based on a selection of myths and half truths.

But in an article appearing in today's edition (complete with trite picture of a crowded city street, yawn), the poisonous tabloid goes one step too far in emulating BNP literature.

"White Britons 'will be outnumbered' if immigration continues at current rate", is the appalling headline, a classic piece of scaremongering based on a number of quotations from one Professor David Coleman of Oxford University.

The academic, as quoted by the Mail, seems to be especially worried about skin colour, drawing a clear dividing line between white and non-white Britons.

Which is what makes the article particularly obnoxious: the "concern" no longer being just about non-British people outnumbering British people, but about people of a certain skin hue, which is exactly the kind of game the BNP has been playing for years.

Do we really - in 2010, while you'd have thought this kind of shit died out decades ago - do we really have to remind the Daily Mail and Professor Coleman that many people are as British as the Queen even though their skin colour may be another?

Are they aware of how appalling it is to place under a "different" category millions of people who may have been British for generations and are still made to feel alien (as if their Britshness was not quite the same or, worse, something to resent altogether)?

For the record - and needless to say the Daily Mail makes no mention of this - Prof Coleman is not an objective source, but the co-founder of right-wing lobby group Migration Watch, an organisation known for its cavalier use of statistics when issuing those press releases that make up half the content of the Daily Express and other UK tabloids.

In the past, Coleman also became the focus of some controversy for its connections with the Galton Institute, formerly known as Eugenics Society (see here and here for details).