The Celebrity Big Brother “celebs” didn’t even realise that anyone would find them to be wrong. Well, OK, this blog has already insulted their intelligence levels enough. ( 1st 2nd ). Government policies are made by people who have usually spent a good few years at private schools and Oxbridge. Do they have any decent excuses?

A few local and national institutional policies that aren’t addressing the CBB worldview:

• Not mentioning racism. Government now focuses on “diversity.” Institutions like the Commission for Racial Equality are being shut down.and replaced by an umbrella organisation that lumps together all the institutions that were set up to challenge discrimination. It doesn’t distinguish between different forms of social injustices. It jumbles them up in a way that will weaken all of them.
• Buying the votes of the religious through supporting “faith” schools leads directly to social division. Kids who grow up exposed to only one set of people are not too likely to learn to see other people as equals.
• Giving support to housing associations that carry out racial zoning policies in a belief that they are meeting the needs of communities.
• Buying the support of “communities” with financial incentives, such as business loans, to “community leaders” who are often first identified as “community leaders” by the people who are funding them. Access to funds targeted at particular ethnicities and religions can raise a community leader’s status pretty quickly from “self-appointed”

This approach is an updated version of the “Lugard” system adopted in the period of British colonialism- picl local leaders to control the territory for you. . It may seem to work in the short term from the official standpoint. However, the very same people whose desire for power and funds makes them so easy to corrupt co-opt are, almost by definition, hardly the people you would trust to control your community.

The latter approach causes resentment from rival “communities” and “leaders” who aren’t from currently fashionable ethnic/religious/racial group and fosters enmity.Activities such as providing “females-only swimming, for Muslim women” – that you might suspect would contravene a good few anti-discrimination laws – are encouraged. The sorts of things that may sound progressive and “inclusive”, until you think that these are facilities to keep Islamic women secluded from the rest of society.

• Our government is happy to play on anti-foreigner hysteria whipped up by the press to gain support for its monstrous plans for us all to carry machine readable ID and to put all our personal details into interrelated interdepartmental databases. What powerful official body would challenge the demonisation of specific groups of foreigners and lose such a reliable source of support?
• They then cover everything with a layer of hypocrisy. Politicians are falling over each other’s feet in the rush to call most loudly for a ban on the Celebrity Big Brother for its revelation of racist attitues in the very people who really might be too stupid to know what they are doing. Cover-up being apparently wiser than dealing with problems.