The Telegraph’s Racist Underbelly

No doubt it seemed a good idea at the time: the Telegraph’s James Kirkup has used Young Dave’s jolly good trip to India to ask the question “Could Britain have an Indian Prime Minister?”, but sadly, the response from the paper’s own devoted commenters has once again demonstrated why Zelo Street refers to it as a “comments sewer”.

Why Kirkup has written the piece is not so hard to figure out: the Tel is, ultimately, a loyal Tory supporting title, and this is an attempt to show that the party is more forward-looking than those rotten lefties. After all, the Tories had the first woman PM, so why not the first who can trace their immediate family back to the Indian sub-continent? That can then be contrasted with Labour and the Lib Dems.

But it all goes wrong when Kirkup puts a photo of the appallingly self-promoting Priti Patel in there. Merely because she is adept at shooting her mouth off and garnering publicity does not make her Prime Ministerial. If that were so, then the next Tory leadership contest would be down to her, Rob Wilson, Robert Halfon, Peter Bone, Douglas Carswell, Nadine Dorries, and maybe Bozza.

And that’s a truly disturbing prospect, but it pales into insignificance when one looks at the comments. Here, after one kind soul calls the Duchess of Cambridge’s family “pikeys”, another asks “Why would the people of Britain – the real ones – want to be led by Indians? Or Jews ... this is our land, and the populations colonising us since WW2 are not here with our consent”.

Just 20 people recommended that. Here’s another, bemoaning “Sanctimonious claptrap will bring us nothing but extinction. And extinction is the Future of the British people ... I support the team with the most white people in it ... we have destroyed our country. We are the first people in history to have committed suicide”. Only two liked that, but it had just been posted, so give it time.

Here, a commenter asks “Will Britain ever have a white PM again? After Jewish Ed Miliband there is ... African Chuka Umunna ... then African Adam Afriyie (both Umunna and Afriyie were born in the UK). Another panics “it won’t be that long before we have a Muslim Parliament”. A third asserts “The Government allows Indians who are not British citizens to vote in our elections”.

And, as the man said, there’s more. Here someone states “The cultural Marxists ... now firmly in control of most of this country are intent on selling the white indigenous population down the river and replacing us with the hostile and freeloading masses of the third world”. Another talks of folks wanting to be “lead by those that look like them”. James Kirkup’s idea was a novel and interesting one, but.

All he has done is shown that I was right to call it a “comments sewer”.