We’ve all been there: late for a train, starving, and so you’re forced to buy some over-priced slop from a sandwich chain on the station forecourt. You’re in a hurry, and so is the hard-pressed, minimum-waged shop assistant.
In the muddle that follows, they mess up your order. Annoying, yes – but for Huddersfield’s Labour MP, Barry Sheerman, this was a chance to take aim at foreigners. On 23 April, he tweeted:
“Just had worst coffee and bacon bap in London at Victoria Station. Why can’t Camden Food Co employ English staff?”
When asked by one of his Twitter followers if he was being xenophobic about the “eastern European” woman who served him, Mr Sheerman – who once explained his opposition to a ban on fox-hunting “because I don’t like the persecution of minorities” – replied:
“We are all allowed a small English rant on St George’s day aren’t we?”
Followed by:
“I am not a xenophobe. I am an MP and I represent the good folk of Huddersfield not Gdansk!”
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Mr Sheerman later told the Huddersfield Examiner that unemployed people in his constituency should have “first crack” at jobs “rather than someone who has arrived from eastern Europe yesterday” and that “high levels” of immigration also “put pressure on housing, hospitals and our schools”.
Yet if Mr Sheerman really was motivated by concern for his hard-working Huddersfield constituents, perhaps he can explain why it was in their interests to:
- Grandstand on “foreign” competition for jobs when we are in the middle of a crisis caused by the banks and made worse by the coalition’s failed economic policies?
- Spend 13 years supporting a New Labour government committed to a “flexible” labour market with some of the harshest anti-union laws in Europe, under which inequality of income rose, and where some argue that the free movement of labour was used as a “21st-century incomes policy”?
- Vote for an Iraq war that precipitated a major refugee crisis?
- Vote for anti-terrorism measures that have treated British Muslims as a problem community and a potential “enemy within”?
- Acquiesce to the removal of compulsory language GCSEs, making it harder for British workers to compete in the international jobs market and increasing the hostility mono-lingual English speakers feel when they hear foreign languages spoken in public?
- Choose St George’s Day to have an “English rant” when some of his Labour colleagues are trying to “de-toxify” English nationalism, and when Kirklees, the borough in which his constituency is located, is only just free of BNP candidates for the first time in 12 years?
Mr Sheerman is absolutely right that we should be able to talk about difficult issues without fear of “pernicious political correctness”. Perhaps he can start with the above. I’m sure his constituents – including the ones for whom English is not a first language, or whose families originate overseas – would love to know.
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