PEMBROKESHIRE is a very pale county.
The fields are green. The beaches a sandy yellow. The sea is blue. The mountains are grey. The uplands bare and brown.
But Pembrokeshire’s people are pale.
Around 3% of the population belong to black and ethnic minority groups or are of mixed parentage. Out of a population of 125,000, that’s 3,750 individuals.
To put that in perspective, one-third of Pembrokeshire’s population wasn’t even born in Wales. That’s a pinch over 41,500 people.
Those figures might offer some explanation – but hardly an excuse – for some of the attitudes published on social media over the last few weeks about the Black Lives Matter campaign.
The people who have shouted the loudest and made the biggest arses of themselves online are those whose experience of other cultures and people of colour is received wisdom transmitted via right-wing tabloids. Either that, or their views are formed out of the outfall of filth spread online by neon-Nazi groups (for example, ‘Britain First’), racist thugs like ‘Tommy Robinson’, and propaganda and lies provided by sites and pages like ‘British Patriot News’.
How many people out there, how many of you – readers – have seen something online with a Union flag in the corner carrying a sentiment like ‘Our Troops are all Heroes’ carrying the message that ‘only my true friends will dare share this’. Most of those posts eventually link back to pages, groups or websites operated by the sort of vile racist scum who rampaged through London last weekend.
They are not run by patriots. Badger is pretty sure that most of the people running them are exactly the sort of arm-waving shits Badger’s granddad spent time shooting during the Second World War – or of a piece with those interned like Mosley or hanged like William Joyce.
The nature of experiencing racial politics at second or third hand, at least if you don’t live through the experience of sharing space with people of different ethnicities daily, is that it is impossible the casual racism of everyday language.
In Pembrokeshire, where 97% of people are white, the chances of getting exposure to other cultures are minuscule.
It is not that long ago that a noisy minority of those in Pembrokeshire who voted to leave the European Union did so to stop mosques being built in places like Hakin.
It’s not that long before that you couldn’t go into a pub without hearing abusive racial epithets flung around like confetti.
It follows, in Badger’s view, any surprise that more than a handful of people in Pembrokeshire cling to familiarity and fear difference and express that through repeating racist language and ideas – either knowingly or unknowingly – is just a pile of horse apples.
People – most of them – are not stupid. They are not thick, uneducated yokels.
SOME of the people repeating offensive racist and bigoted language are racist bigots who happen to be stupid. They are the sort of people who use Alf Garnett as a poster boy for their views without realising Alf Garnett satirised views like theirs.
SOME people are racists because they honestly and sincerely believe that they are members to a superior race or have a chip on their shoulder about the fact they’re not.
MOST of the remainder simply don’t see the issue.
That’s because the experience of living in Pale Pembrokeshire insulates them from the daily reality of living in a diverse society.
Many, in all of the groups identified above, are reasonable, intelligent human beings. Many of them are genuinely baffled about why their language offends.
It is the minority which pisses in the pool of public discussion and mean to pollute it.
Badger has phrased all of the above very carefully. He has studiously avoided tarring everyone out there with one brush. But there is not a grey area here.
It’s not a difference between black and white. It’s the difference between right and wrong.
Bigotry in any form makes Badger angry. He has sat and listened for too long to far too many people spout too much racist and bigoted bollocks not to express his view.
He will do so in his usual roundabout way.
On the eve of the NHS’ creation, battered and bruised by Conservative carping at the jewel in Labour’s legislative crown and attempts to derail it, Aneurin Bevan used the following words to describe his experience and the experience of millions under Conservative rule.
‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So, as far as I am concerned, they are lower than vermin’.
Badger knows plenty of Conservatives, both shy and vocal. They’re not lower than vermin. Badger may not agree with them on politics, but Badger doesn’t agree with other parties’ policies, too. Most politicians – at every level – are decent people trying their best to deliver the impossible to voters who are in a more or less continuous state of outrage about something.
However, those racists and bigots who know they’re racists and bigots, who wrap themselves in the flag to hide who they are, who despise democracy and the rule of law, who espouse racism and bigotry, and who encourage others to do the same… they aspire to be ‘lower than vermin’, readers. They have a long way to crawl out of their sewers to get to vermin’s underbelly.
Badger has looked at some of the comments on The Herald’s Facebook page on stories about the comments made by Cllr Paul Dowson. He has stared with horror and at some of the exchanges on social media about the row over other councillors’ conduct and at the responses those posts have attracted.
Reading those comments and some councillors’ social media has left Badger with this thought: it is better to be thought a fool and remain silent than to speak and dispel any doubt.
