Bill's Comment Page

Ann Winterton and “10 a penny” Pakistanis

Ann Winterton, a senior Front-bench spokeswoman for the Conservative Party is reported to have alluded to “10 a penny” Pakistanis as the punchline to a joke she told in a speech at a rugby club dinner. Various people, including the usual bunch of Labour Party attention-seekers (Ann Cryer MP for one), have categorised her remarks as ‘racist’ and have called for her resignation; let’s examine this shall we?

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has categorised Ms Winterton’s remarks as “unfortunate”, but has not called for her to resign; I think this is a balanced and accurate assessment. Her remarks were indeed unfortunate and it would have been far better if another subject could have been found for her joke, specially after local elections in which three BNP councillors were elected last Thursday and the second round of the French Presidential elections today, when the alternative to Presidential ‘immune from prosecution’ incumbent Jacques Chirac is the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. However, Ms Cryer’s Party ‘band-standing’ is way over the top and diminishes the good work she has done in the past in relation to gay rights; a sense of proportion please – if one were to say that in Britain whites are 100 or 1000 a penny, it might be considered slightly bizarre, perhaps unkind, but hardly racist and certainly not (so far as the numbers are concerned, if not the price attributed to them) inaccurate.

However, Ms Cryer does have a point, perhaps, when she asks: “What are they saying in private?” and it is in this context, and the context in which Ms Winterton made the remark, as part of a joke at the expense of Pakistanis, that justifies the classification of the remarks as ‘unfortunate’ by the CRE. It is easy to use ‘minorities’ or ‘outsiders’ as the butt of humour, and possibly Ms Winterton, thinking that she was speaking at a private function amongst members of a rugby club who might perhaps acquiesce, or share, her somewhat disparaging joke at the expense of a minority, allowed the normal rules of ‘polite society’ to be bent somewhat. She has since apologised profusely for the remarks, but one of course strongly suspects that this is solely because someone present took exception to the joke and chose to make it public.

At the very least Ms Winterton is guilty of a lack of political sensibility, or in colloquial parlance ‘nous’, but more seriously I think what it betrays is a mindset which thinks that it is acceptable to make minorities the object of humour in a negative way, to point them up as ‘other’ – it betrays, I strongly suspect, what she thinks [and what she assumed her audience would think] in her innermost self about some groups of people who are ‘different’ or distinct in one way or another.

I think such views are regrettably quite commonplace amongst many British people, and certainly amongst many members of the Conservative Party, but probably amongst many members of the Labour Party and other mainstream Parties, too, so no Party should attempt to make political ‘capital’ out of this – trying to pretend otherwise is shoddy. What it does point up is the need to examine one’s views dispassionately – it’s not freedom of speech which is the problem (I strongly support the right to hold unpleasant or unpopular views), but the fact that such views are rather more commonplace than many appear prepared to accept or deal with.