Liberte, Fraternite & Egalite and the plague of racist Europe

We can also explain why asylum seekers will literally risk life and limb to leave the French soil for soggy fish and chips and the cold, damp British climate: a significant proportion of French society are officially and overtly racist.

If one adds together the blatant racists - those that voted for Le Pen - with those who think it but don't say it, a wretched picture is painted of a nation that is hostile to people of colour.

My own limited experience is testimony to that. On my few visits to Paris, when I engaged with a number of white Parisians and attempted basic conversation: 'Mademoiselle, Je parle un peu francais. Parlez vous anglais? I was often met with an irritable, dismissive look that only Black people recognise as the silent words of racism.

'Je ne parle pas anglaise', (I don't speak English) would be the abrupt reply. Now, everyone knows that some Parisians take issue with the global domination of everything English, so I attempted to shrug off the abruptness as an Anglo-French thing rather than racism. But I speak much better Spanish than I do French. Surely if I passed as a Black Hispanic I would not receive the same hostility? Forget it.

I might as well have spoken in Japanese as far as the majority of people I met were concerned. I felt that they felt I was simply an inferior human being to many of them. In fact more often than not, the only people that really showed any warmth or even due respect was either fellow tourists or people of colour: French Algerians, and Africans.

If you're Black, liberty, fraternity and equality seem rather meaningless unless that is you belong to the world beating French football team. By the way, how do the French square their majority Black football team with French identity?

Sadly France isn't alone in Europe's hot spots for Black people to avoid. The Austrian far right party is the country's official opposition party. Until recently it was headed by Joerg Hieder, the renowned holocaust denier. The Danish Far Right Party (Dansk Folkeparti) is the country's third biggest party and underpins a hard-line centre-right coalition government.

In Antwerp, Belgium's second biggest city, the far right Party (The Vlaams Blok) dominate local politics, with an agenda to repatriate all people of colour to their countries of origin. Other EU countries such as Holland, Germany, Italy and Spain are also plagued with far right groups.

In comparison to mainland Europe, the UK is the land of milk and honey when it comes to race relations. And that's not saying a great deal when one considers the Home Secretary's remarks that children of asylum seekers are 'swamping' British schools.

Blunkett, like many other EU senior politicians are attempting to appease right wing anxieties towards immigration and asylum and neutralise the far the right by stealing their thunder and adopting hard line policies.

As Gary Younge points out in last week's Guardian, they're wrong: 'Every step you make in the direction of a racist agenda does not "neutralise" racists it emboldens them. They will always make better bigots than mainstream politicians... because they have more practice and have fewer qualms of conscience'.

So where does that leave Black Britain? In the short term we have an immediate battle to comprehensively defeat the British National Party in London, the midlands and the Northern Mill towns of Oldham and Burnley. Operation Black Vote, The 1990Trust and the National Assembly against Racism are campaigning with a fifty foot ad van with the emblazoned message, 'All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing'.

In the medium and long term Black groups, trade unions and good people in general must be prepared to challenge main stream politicians on their 'have now, pay dearly in the long term' policies that generate division and hostility towards Britain's Black communities.

If we do nothing, make no mistake we will follow the slippery and slimy path of many EU countries. And like many other EU countries Black people will continue to be at the forefront of the sporting teams and add spices to their palate, but we'll always be, whether born here or not, regarded as immigrants.