No matter how pink they want it to look like, blue still draws to dark..

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: David Cameron's message is that Muslims are not wanted


Muslims and migrants are being used to distract people from the planned chaos implemented by this unpopular coalition. It is politicking of the worst kind

The Indenpendent – Monday, 7 Feb 20011

Not many dawns have passed since the sparky Tory chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi spoke up about the "dinner table" libelling of all Muslims, now routine, normalised, unremarkable, intimate, uncontested. I see and hear it, too – prejudices passed around with the balsamic vinegar or ketchup. Some Muslims deserve castigation and worse for the terrible things they do. I frequently denounce them in my columns. But sweeping, indiscriminate execration of any collective is abhorrent and must be confronted. Warsi did that, knowing her words would infuriate right-wing Tories who can't stand the brown little upstart.

Now, how will she react to her leader, who has amplified the small talk of bigotry and boomed it through a megaphone, perhaps to slap her down? I found Cameron's speech in Munich indefensible even though I completely agree with some observations and policy ideas. We discussed these two years back when we met in his office for over an hour. Self-exclusion, special pleading, women's rights, community oppression, anti-democratic attitudes, terrorism, the spread of Wahhabi Islam are serious problems and growing. Laissez-faire multicultural policies do not serve our times. State institutions should fund shared spaces, crossover ideas, openness and modernity. Many of us Muslims would be with David Cameron if his speech hadn't shown him to be selective, hypocritical, calculating, woefully indifferent to Muslim victims of relentless racism and chauvinism. He was speaking the words of white extremists but in posh. There was so much that was objectionable – where he spoke, what he said, the timing, the purposes loitering behind the fine façade of his personality.

By speaking out in Munich he allied himself with the ghastly Angela Merkel who delivered a similarly provocative sermon last autumn. Racism is rife in both countries; in both nations, millions of their own natives rigidly hold on to their languages and cultures. Think of those Germans who go abroad on holiday and stay in walled-off camps where only German is spoken. Countless Britons are similarly against integration with the people of unfamiliar countries they visit or migrate to. I would rather have my tongue chopped off than lose my mellifluous home languages. To learn and love English shouldn't mean the destruction of world languages, most of which we are lucky enough to have on our isles.

Remember the PM was at an international security council when he let rip – an outrage. Diversity is one of our greatest assets, an antidote to militancy not its cause. A new study by the Runnymede Trust in Birmingham shows young citizens are more bonded and at ease with difference than their elders in that multifarious city. As the speech progressed, you realised that Cameron's problem isn't cultural difference. It's the people whom marauding Christian Crusaders called "curs", wretched Mohammedans. Cameron isn't troubled by Hassidic enclaves, Orthodox Jewish dress codes, or their religiously sanctioned gender inequality and stubborn self-removal from mainstream societies. I have been rebuffed by a veiled Muslim woman and a Hassidic Jewish one when I tried to talk to their children. And the other day a young white mum told her daughter to come away from me, the "Paki". Moreover, those who only want to live with their own in white heartlands are thought to be no threat to integration – they are only doing what comes naturally. Little official concern is expressed about crimes committed by various non-Muslim ethnic groups against each other, against Muslims or white Britons. Even more disgracefully, Tories ignore racists who terrorise people of colour. How unfair is that?

Our PM, in effect, identified himself with the abominable English Defence League when he spoke up a day before the league marched through Luton shouting abuse. Are these the laudable British values we must embrace? Hot-headed Muslims will be even more convinced they are not wanted in the land of their birth.

The next charge: hypocrisy. This Government is enthusiastically funding schools for separatists – from snooty white middle-classes, to pedantic, purist Hindus, nutty, evangelical Christians, and introverted, uncompromising Muslims. How does that foster integration? Michael Gove has just been accused by Bradford City Council of encouraging segregation by funding a new free school started up by Ayub Ismail, who wants to ensure his pupils are not "absorbed into the dominant culture". Saudis are allowed by our Government to brainwash Muslims who are then despised. The Tory party's right and left buttocks move in different directions. Not clever nor consistent with the PM's Big Message of the week.

So why is he doing it? When politicians are in trouble they pick on "outsiders", put them into stocks so the people can turn on them and relieve their feelings of frustration. Andrew Lansley, now in charge of health, said shamelessly in 1995 that they were using the anti-immigration card because it played well with voters. Recently he blamed migrants for a rise in TB in Britain, a link that used healthcare concerns to whip up xenophobic panic. Cameron himself designed the disgraceful anti-refugee campaign for Michael Howard in 2005.

The German Marshall Fund has just published a comparative survey of attitudes to migrants in Western countries. Britons, noted The Economist, are shown up as a "mean-minded lot" – negative, hostile, paranoid. I don't believe that is the full picture. Britain is also uniquely receptive – which is why so many of us would not live elsewhere. But it is going through a seriously bad mood and Cameron is exploiting that.

I accept our citizens are unnerved by those British Muslims who make endless demands, are full of wrath and murderous plans, or choose ghettoisation. However, the widespread national unhappiness is created by policies pushed through by this Government. Muslims and migrants are being used to distract people from the planned chaos implemented by this unpopular coalition. It is politicking of the worst kind. Which is why it must be opposed vehemently. As the daughter of a survivor said to me at the Holocaust Memorial Day in January: "We Jews must look to our failings and crimes. But when outsiders try to use that for their devilish reasons, we know where we must stand." Me too.

Joan Smith: Hague's problem is sense, not sexuality

Rumours about the Foreign Secretary's love life have circulated for years, but it is using Ffion to prop up his story that is shocking


The Independent - Sunday, 5 September 2010

First, a little history: in 1999, a Conservative MP called Shaun Woodward was one of the party's frontbench spokesmen. When his leader, William Hague, committed the Tories to opposing the abolition of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act – a notorious piece of legislation which outlawed the "promotion of homosexuality" – Woodward refused to toe the line. Hague sacked him and Woodward defected to Labour, where he enjoyed a meteoric rise and later became a cabinet minister.

Hague was unrepentant and a few weeks later he chose the Daily Mail, the traditional defender of "family values", to underline his support for Section 28. "It prevents, mainly through deterrence, public authorities from engaging in the sort of inappropriate activity that resulted in such public disquiet in the 1980s," he wrote early in 2000. When the Labour government finally got round to repealing Section 28 in 2003, Hague (no longer Tory leader) voted to keep it.

While there are grounds for thinking that Hague is conflicted, if not confused, on the issue of gay rights his extraordinary behaviour last week, when he issued a detailed statement about his marriage in an attempt to quash rumours that he has had gay relationships, suggests he is also confused about the boundaries between public and private life.

Hague is now a cabinet minister, occupying the grand suite of offices in King Charles Street, London SW1, from which the Foreign Secretary presides over Britain's relations with the rest of the world. It's hardly as though he starts each morning with an empty diary, but four days ago one of the top items on his agenda was the delicate matter of his wife's gynaecological history.

In a spectacularly misguided attempt to counter rumours about his sexual orientation, Hague revealed that he and his wife Ffion (they married in 1997) have been trying to have children and she has suffered a series of miscarriages. One consequence was a rash of features about the misery caused by miscarriage, but the dominant reaction was bewilderment and a degree of distaste.

If Hague was, as it appeared, using intimate details of his marriage to "prove" that he wasn't gay, it didn't seem to have occurred to him that many gay men get married and have children, a circumstance confirmed last weekend by an announcement from Crispin Blunt, a ministerial colleague. The Tory MP and prisons minister announced that he had separated from his wife of 20 years, with whom he has two children, and decided to "come to terms" with his homosexuality.

Clearly, a couple's reproductive history is not definitive proof of heterosexuality, which makes Hague's decision to expose himself and his wife in this way all the more perplexing. The Conservative Party is supposed to be more tolerant and sophisticated about sexual matters than it has been in the past, a shift signalled by David Cameron's public apology last year for his party's support for Section 28.

Would it matter a jot if Hague were gay, or indeed bisexual, given that there are increasing numbers of self-identified gay MPs and ministers at Westminster? This isn't 1984, when the decision of Labour's Chris Smith to come out as the country's first openly gay MP was rightly seen as brave and ground-breaking.

In that sense, it's hard not to see the Foreign Secretary's problems as largely of his own making. Rumours about Hague's sexuality have circulated at Westminster for years, and if he was troubled by them, it was hardly sensible to share hotel rooms during the general election campaign with a handsome young aide, Chris Myers.

It was even less sensible to appoint the same young man – he is only 25, and does not have obvious qualifications for the job – to a coveted post as one of his special advisers. Last week, Myers resigned, leaving Hague to observe testily during a press conference with the German foreign minister that his former aide was "fed up with the political world – and who can blame him?"

It wasn't the only occasion in the past few days when Hague appeared not to understand how he had got himself, his wife and Myers into this unhappy situation. At the heart of the matter isn't so much a question about his sexuality – he denies being gay and no one has to date produced any evidence to the contrary – but his inconsistent attitude to homosexuality. During his campaign to become leader of the Tory party, Hague unexpectedly supported the idea of gay marriage, and in his Daily Mail article a decade ago, he said he believed that the age of consent for gay people should be 16.

But in the very same article, he made it clear that he would impose a three-line whip on Tory MPs to ensure that they supported the homophobic Section 28. The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was sufficiently incensed to reveal that Hague had responded to a letter from the pressure group OutRage! and "refused to support gay equality" on a whole series of issues.

Hague is described on websites as voting "moderately" against equal rights for gay people. Some of his remarks last week – he described the rumours about himself and Myers as "malicious" and denied that he'd ever had an "improper" relationship with a man – suggest that his personal views on homosexuality are out of step in a world where gay couples are able to celebrate civil partnerships. When the rumours about him were at their height, he had the option of facing them down, limiting himself to an unequivocal denial and getting on with his job. Instead, he added fuel to the bonfire with a tasteless and defensive overreaction.

These days, most of us don't mind whether politicians are gay or straight, but an incontestable fact has emerged from the most catastrophic attempt at damage limitation that British politics has seen for many a year. Now we know that the person who cares most passionately about the Foreign Secretary's sexual orientation is none other than William Hague.

William Hague

Hague is fag! Hague is a fag! Hague is fag! Hague is a fag! Hague is a fag!!

Deny that, you pillock! ¬¬

Ja?

Aw yes! I forgot to mention I've been having the most insane crush on Nick Clegg for the past six months! It's not so much sexual as it is that he's a very well-educated man who can speak five languages fluently (among other things). So I don't care what he thinks or does now, I still want to put my head on his bosom in front of a fireplace and listen to him for hours.

And those hands...^^