Enough!

Today someone I like and am delighted to volunteer with referred to a neighbour as 'a Paki'. He was talking about a thief he caught trying to take a chair from his back garden and said this man came from the 'high flats' round the corner. In parts of Glasgow the high flats are reserved for immigrants and not a good place to come from. He's made remarks like this before and I've always argued with him: he doesn't know where this person lives; he doesn't know if he's from Pakistan; if the man is a thief, his colour doesn't matter a damn; he wouldn't want his niece's wee girl (aged 2) to grow up with that kind of prejudice, would he?

Then when I got home, I had a look on Facebook and found that a relative of a relative by marriage had put up a post about 'darkies' and complained (it was written with exclamation marks and smiley faces so I think it was meant to be funny) that the 'c***s' were 'breeding.' I've been through this scenario before, when people refer to black folk as 'our ethnic friends'. You just know they are not their friends, don't you?

None of the people above know any black people. None of them have black friends or relatives.

I'm fed up with this. It's what's referred to as 'casual racism' - in other words, unthinking, fairly stupid, based on sheer ignorance but apparently allowed now that UKIP and the other right wing parties are attracting votes in elections.

But it's not all right, folks, especially in Scotland. Scotland has fewer immigrants than a lot of the other areas of the UK. I believe only 13% of the people who live in Scotland come from outside the country and a lot of them come from other UK countries. We need people to come and live - and work - here. Scotland has been 'bleeding' people since about 1945: roughly 20% of our population emigrates to other parts of the UK and often other parts of the world. Their talents are lost to us and they don't come back.

Besides, this prejudice against black people is just replacing suspicion of Jews, Italians, Poles and that vague group 'the Irish', all of whom were victimised in Scotland at various points in the 20th century.

And still we have this blind refusal to accept newcomers.

The bottom line is we all have to live here. We have a choice: we can bring our wee kids up hating people of other groups or we can get used to the idea of a multi-racial society. I know what I prefer.