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“Environmentalists are anti-immigration nationalists” – say what?
In an astonishingly bitter rant in defence of her right to buy foreign strawberries and beans, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent has today stated in her column that environmentalists are anti-immigration. She provides no qualifiers—just anti-immigration, as if you’re either for or against it, in totality, without exceptions, full stop. She smears those of us who advocate buying local food as being racist nationalists, and provides many false and grossly offensive reasons why we advocate local produce while not referencing a single actually genuine reason.
I’m disappointed. The woman’s appearances on BBC News, reviewing the newspapers, have in the past been occasionally entertaining. But I will from now on switch over immediately whenever I see this racist, pompous, bigoted ostrich show her face on my TV screen. I don’t want to hear or read another word from her addled brain. Maybe it’s something in the strawberries as opposed to the water?
Some examples of her madness:
Should good people be party to a vociferous movement which wants to refuse entry to “alien” foods? Look at the language used and you realise it is a proxy for anti-immigration sentiments: these foods from elsewhere come and take over our diets, reduce national dishes to third-class status, compete unfairly with Scotch broth and haggis, both dying out, excite our senses beyond decorum, contaminate the identity of the country irreversibly.
Indigenous Britons are in a mighty sulk over strangers on their shores, our weird languages, strong colours and tastes, and “unBritish” ways. Keeping out Kenyan beans and Caribbean pineapples is a sop to cultural paranoia, rising nausea. The country can’t stomach any more foreignness and wants old simplicities back again. The rightful inhabitants think they want nothing but turnips and potatoes through our long winters, and in the summer, asparagus of genetically proven Englishness.
I’m all for people being bonkers—eccentricity is wonderful—but when the debate over food miles and CO2 emissions and supporting local farmers starts to involve mad middle-aged women labelling those of us who think about what we eat and where it comes from as a bunch of imperialist racists, it’s a sign that the inevitable backlash, stemming from fear of the end being nigh for unfettered consumerism, has begun in earnest.
You can either accept the future, and embrace change, or you can choose to see restrictions where others see new opportunities. It’s everyone’s right to take a stand for or against on any issue. But the ‘you’re a racist and want to stop me eating foreign food’ argument only serves to blur people’s perceptions and understanding of what racism is when it actually rears its ugly head. It leads to opposing and often equally facetious arguments, meaning inevitably that this results in most ordinary people being asked to choose between two sets of lies without ever having been troubled with facts, figures, or reasoning. We need intelligent discourse, not self-defensive rants hammered out on keyboards after a dinner composed of entirely foreign foodstuffs.
I am reminded of the comedian—I forget the name—who had a series of sketches involving a character who, no matter what was being discussed, always responded with the line, “is it because I is black?” and, in so doing, underlined the dangers of seeing racism everywhere. Condemn everyone, their every action—that is, everyone who is white, presumably—and you dilute the real impact of prejudice on those who suffer it every day. And when you bring environmentalism to the table and claim it to be racist in the things it advocates, you do even more damage.
It’s relevant to add that environmentalists are a diverse, multi-coloured bunch of people. So what is this woman suggesting by inference? That black and Asian environmentalists are self-loathing? Rubbish. A great number of environmentalists, of all skin colours, are involved in anti-racist organisations as well.
Does Yasmin Alibhai-Brown really believe you can tackle prejudice and propaganda by introducing more prejudice and propaganda into the national debates over food production and sourcing?
