A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published around the 30th April 1999.

Your editorial (28th April) points to an apparent contradiction in the responses of the Labour government to the bomb outrages in Brixton and Brick Lane on the one hand and the IRA bombing in Northern Ireland on the other.

The contradiction is only apparent because, unlike ordinary people, left wing politicians adhere to a hierarchy of preference based on race and class which takes precedence over every other feature of human life – achievement, kindness, decency, loyalty.

In any dispute or problem, non-White people come first in this hierarchy.  Among White people foreigners come before people of British descent, especially if their countries are governed by left wing politicians, however incompetent or corrupt.  Among the native British, people wishing to break up the United Kingdom – Republican Irish in particular – are next in favour.  At the bottom of Labour’s preference scale come the English, especially the Protestant southern English middle class, who vie with Ulster Unionists as those for whom the greatest contempt and scorn are reserved.

Thus the left dominated union Unison, which claims to represent 1.5 million people, can pass a resolution which scorns Florence Nightingale precisely because (as was made clear by the resolution’s supporter on Tuesday’s  BBC Radio4 PM programme) she was English, Protestant and well-to-do.  The fact that in about 20 months she organised the relief of almost unimaginable suffering, that she forced through changes in a way which only a middle or upper class English woman of the day could possible do, that her health was broken in the endeavour, that she devoted the next 50 years of her long life to building the profession of nursing, and that she was the first female member of the Order of Merit – all of which achievement is recognised the world over – is nothing to the class and race obsessed harridans who moved the Unison resolution.

In the light of these left wing preferences, the Labour government’s very different reactions to Brick Lane and Belfast are perfectly explicable.