Bossi by name, nazsty by nature.

The campaign for the European election is under way. The poster pictured above, promoting the Northern League led by Margaret Beckett look-a-like Umbert Bossi, was the first to appear. It sent a shiver down my spine. At least in the UK the law prevents scum like the BNP peddling such obnoxious opinions so blatantly. Until comparatively recently Italy was much more relaxed about immigration than the UK: indeed it’s only now that a law is going through parliament making illegal immigration a crime. In other ways Italy has been ‘ahead’ of Britain. In England for most of my life ‘immigrant’ was a euphemism for a black or brown person. In Italy, despite the large numbers of poor souls who arrive by boat on her shores from Africa, the immigrant who bears the brunt of  local prejudice is the Romanian or the Albanian. Not helped by the fact that one Italian word for gypsy ‘rom’ easily elides into ‘rumeno’, Romanian. The UK is of course catching up: Wisbech when I first lived in the Fens was inhabited by people who rarely ventured as far as King’s Lynn, 15 miles down the A47, and who had never seen a foreigner or non-white Englishman in the flesh. They had to vent their prejudice on the gypsies who turned up for seasonal work on the local farms, a large number of Fen pubs having ‘No Travellers’ notices displayed on their front doors. Now its market square is thronged with people from eastern Europe, and the locals don’t like it: ‘fucking immigrants’ are no longer just black people from Birmingham but the Poles and  Lithuanians who work for local gangmasters at slave wages.

   But Bossi is way ahead of the game. It’s not just blacks and eastern Europeans who are despised: it’s anyone hailing from south of the Po. ‘Roma ladra’, thieving Rome, is seen as the chief enemy, taking the North’s wealth to distribute to the ‘nigger’ inhabitants of Campania, Calabria and Sicily. And here of course we see the ultimate absurdity of the racist’s and xenophobe’s position. Following their logic one might well ask why Milan, a wealthy and prosperous city, should be compelled to inhabit the same province as the inhabitants of some impoverished village in its hinterland. And to push it even further why should the inhabitant of a prosperous Milanese district be made to inhabit the same comune, Milan, as those living in its slums?

  One of the arguments employed by eurosceptics against the greater fiscal and political integration which might save us from declining into a collection of third world statelets is that economic conditions across the EU are too diverse. Do these prats think that economic conditions are  - or ever were - homogenous across the UK. That London and the North-East are economically comparable? So now that Labour, Tory and LibDem MPs have been caught with their hands in the till and Nick Griffin’s opportunity has arisen, here’s a slogan: ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Mercia for the Mercians, Northumbia for the Northumbrians. Bring back the miserable little squabbling Saxon kingdoms which shared  Britain for half a millennium after the legions left!