Whilst promoting his forthcoming autobiography, Sir Gulam Noon, most famous for the production of ready meals, made some very misguided and misleading comments on the BBCs Andrew Marr Show.

In the guise of warning against the BNP's exploitation of racial tensions in the UK, Noon asserted that it is vitally important for no one to be able to say " 'all [the] jobs are being taken away by immigrants' we have to be extremely careful", before following it with the apparently obvious solution "Some sort of a ban should be there." Noon thinks this ban should last between 5 and 10 years.

To explain this, Noon goes on to say that "I strongly feel that whoever are the immigrants here, we better give them jobs and give them dignity to live here before we import some more". He also holds dear the notion that all immigrants should be properly "intergrated and assimilated" into the country before any more are 'allowed in'.

"...import some more...", Sir Gulam? Some more, what? Potatoes? Biscuits? Or cheap, exploitable labour to underpin an increasingly gentrified, service-industry orientated economy, one that also happens to be failing.

The most important thing to bear in mind here is that this is not a case of, 'how dare you say that, you who migrated to this country, have you no empathy?', nor can it be dimissed with a simple 'oh that' easy for you to say, you with your £65million'. For starters, Noon is an open and influential pro-EU supporter, and his remarks have to be seen in the context of the growing 'fortress Europe'. To have a well know and important business making comments that practically amount to openly declaring that immigration control is nothing but a way to funnel labour into the country when it is needed, in high profile media is very, very dangerous. It can lead very quickly to a popular consensus that this state of affairs is, well, alright, commendable, in fact. 'Well, it was said on the BBC, and he's an immigrant and he's done very well, hasn't he, well I suppose he must be right'.

The double-speak nature of Noon's remarks is also extraordinary. To say that the BNP exploit racial tension by telling everyone that immigrants are nicking their jobs, and that the way to solve this is by making sure there are no more immigrants in the UK to have any jobs, is nothing but agreeing with the BNP. There's a circular logic at work here which attributes growing racism to the BNPs exploiting of exitsting racial tensions, racial tension to the immigrants and their employment, and sees as the only real solution to in effect do exactly what the BNP want to do.

Noon goes further in this bizarre analysis of UK racism by saying "There is always a danger that for the sake of political correctness, or a party's political advantage, we find ourselves filling up the country with too many immigrants who will disturb the balance and upset the people, particularly the young people, of the host community."
A lot of this is plain wrong. It is politically correct in this country to think that immigration is a 'problem' caused by immigrants. Immigrants who, apparently, want nothing more than to feed parasite-like on our resources. Politicians gain massively by sticking to this fallacious idea and by regularly publishing figures to suggest that immigration is wildly out of control, whilst at the same time being in complete, brutal control of who comes, who stays and who leaves. Noon's perculiar use of the word "host" perhaps betrays a certain ignorance or deliberate misunderstanding of what current migration to the UK actually entails. People come here to stay because they couldn't stand to stay where they were. It's not a holiday.

The most disturbing thing of course, is to speculate on exactly what Noon means by 'the balance'. Aside from insinuating that it is through crime or violence that immigrants into the UK supposedly "upset the people", this statement seems to be little more than an acceptance and a condoning of the fact that 'foreign' people upset 'British' people, and it is the foreigners, not the British xenephobia and racism, that need to be sorted out. What he means by "particularly the young people" is anyone's guess.

Noon's remarks are highly poisonous, dressed as they are in talk of dignity and the illusion of anti-facism. He propagates simplistic notions of "assimilation" and "integration", as though the two were the same thing. He wants to 'normalise' those who he refers to as "the newcomers". He refuses to see those who come into the UK as people with lives who have made choices, instead viewing everything in racially-tinted statistics. There is, to Noon, no immigrant related racism in this country that cannot be wholly solved by the immigrants themselves.

When followed through, Noon's analysis of UK racism concludes only that 'British' people can't handle too many 'foreign' and 'different' people all in one go. If we stop them coming in for a decade, then everyone can get used to these odd people and their 'upsetting' behaviour, and then we're ready for some more, please.

Is the solution really to beat racism with racism, to lock up the scapegoat so people stop kicking it? And what does it mean for this country if people begin to believe that if only we give the BNP what it wants, then it'll eventually fuck off.