It’s like a virus. In Southall, which is predominantly south Asian, I now frequently see and hear friends and neighbo...

It’s like a virus. In Southall, which is predominantly south Asian, I now frequently see and hear friends and neighbours espousing far right rhetoric about “new arrivals from India”, even when their own parents were immigrants from the same country. Yesterday lunchtime, a friend who suffered terrible racist abuse as the only brown kid at his school, was telling me how “immigration has caused all the problems in Southall.” Nothing to do with poverty, racism, or any other political choices. He was with a white British man, who told me he attends the local drug rehab unit recently relocated to Southall. Supping from a can of super strength lager while sitting on an upturned empty fruit box in between two greengrocers’ pavement displays, he told me how he had spent much of his life in jail for killing a man with a shotgun. He claimed it’s all right for him racially abuse black people because one of his four wives is black and one of his thirty children is black. His advice to his kids?…