The Blue Van George The Poet and Symeon Brown can’t stand

1923 there was a recession in Germany and we all know how a certain political leader used that to his advantage. So in 2013 its rather interesting that UK headlines can’t escape the word immigration. Plus Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg is bopping into dinners that are asking for black people to go “home”, yet not an eyelid has been battered for the verdict on the death of Jimmy Mubenga.

So why is this van seen as the icing on the cake…

The van was not the latest project of the English Defence League, or a far right splinter group, but a pilot campaign by the Home Office operating under the mandate of Parliament. The government had chosen to restore a chant made infamous by the National Front. A chant that greeted my grandparents and a generation of post-war British migrants from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. A chant that was often accompanied by violence. The Home Office put that chant at the heart of a flagship campaign.

The timing was particularly insensitive: it was near the 20th anniversary of the death of Joy Gardner, a 40 year-old Caribbean mother killed in front of her five year-old son while the police attempted to deport her. It added to the feeling that Mubenga and Gardner’s deaths were not individual accidents, but the inevitable result of attitudes towards migrant citizenship in “modern” Britain. The coroner looking into the Mubenga case found “pervasive” racist attitudes among deportation guards in the same way that the Macpherson report found “institutional racism” in the police. – Symeon Brown to read Symeon’s full article click the New Statesman

Check out George The Poet’s thoughts on the van:

What are your thoughts??