STAY AT HOME BARACK, YOU'RE NOT WANTED IN THE UK!

By Stanley Collymore

Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II has extended to Barack Obama the incumbent President of the United States of America an official state invitation to the United Kingdom, whether or not this was a conciliation prize to this mixed race US head of sate and his black wife as some cynics are saying because the Windsors didn’t want Barack and Michelle at William and Kate’s wedding bash I don’t know and frankly don’t care. Anyway, after the cynical, utterly cruel, abysmally heartless and serial adulterous manner in which William’s mother: the immensely well-liked, hugely popular, ironically beautiful and sorely missed, Princess Diana was hideously treated by Charles and his floozy Camilla, now after Diana’s opportune death Charles’ wife herself, never a dye in the wold monarchist myself, William and Kate’s upcoming bash which has been cynically orchestrated by the powers that be in the UK to deflect attention away from the financial mess that they and their friends in the City of London have got the entire country into, is of less concern to me than my regular bowel movements and subsequent lavatory visits. That said for the sake of Diana I wish her son more luck than she unfortunately had or was ever likely to have married to Charles and with Camilla, Charles’ real common law wife, always in the background.

That the queen both as a UK citizen and head of state has a perfect right to invite whoever within reason that she and Philip want to, to come to the UK I have no problem with at all; as it has absolutely nothing to do with me in normal circumstances. In the same way that I don’t feel any compulsion on my part to notify them if and when I choose to invite overseas friends of mine to visit me at home in the UK. The major difference being that all financial outlay incurred when I have my friends from abroad come and see me is borne in full by us and no one else.

This isn’t so with state visits. These things are invariably arranged in secret and without any public consultation whatsoever, which in a democracy is appalling; and an even bitterer pill to have to swallow is that those who engage in these highhanded, pompous gestures quite naturally for them expect us the taxpayers who’ve they already treated with consummate disdain to pay for their vainglorious extravagances. And it’s a fair bet that if they had to fork out, even from their vast wealth, for the upcoming state visit of Mr and Mrs Obama these two persons would by no stretch of the imagination have been invited to London even bearing in mind their respective positions as US president and First Lady that they now officially hold.

For those of you not familiar with the peculiarities of this UK democracy that is my home we’ve move a long way from the Divine Rights of Kings philosophy of James the First of England, he who authorized the very politically motivated James I version of the Bible, to what is essentially, in theory at any rate, a fairly liberal, secular democracy, still with a monarch as its head of state but whose role is very much a constitutional one. And although England, even with the devolution of powers to the other constituent member states of the UK: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of whom have their respective written constitutions for dealing with their internal affairs, hasn’t a written constitution of its own the system which is in place and consists of a codified set of rules and established customs which evolved and have been developed over several centuries functions fairly well, and not only for England but nationally as well, as parliamentary rules and regulations administered from the House of Commons and the House of Lords takes precedence over all else; so in effect it’s English law that is the dominant one.

Even so there are a number of quite weird anomalies in the UK parliamentary system at national level that goes back to the days of the Divine Rights of Kings and although archaic in nature can and do supersede rational, commonsensical and even legal conventions and democratically enacted law. I’m of course referring to what in Britain is commonly called the Royal Prerogative; and since no one has ever bothered to scrap this piece of outdated nonsense – the British hate tampering with tradition even when it’s downright stupid not to do so, that’s why French against any kind of logic is still, going back to 1066 and all that, the official language of England – it remains lurking in the background to be used as a last resort by any dishonest or ineffectual prime minister who can roll it out and arbitrarily use it to his or her advantage and without having to give any explanation even to parliament for their action and with no one, not even parliament, being able to challenge him or her on this most undemocratic behaviour.

One classic example of this was the 1960s collusion between the then British government and US administration to viciously and ethnically cleanse the Chagossian people from their indigenous and ancestral homeland the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean and use the most important island for a US military base that is still there and from which since its inception even British MPs, taking into account that the islands are officially a British colony and therefore in international law it’s Britain that has sovereignty over them, not that the Chagossians ever consented to this earlier take over of their land either, are along with all Chagossians and everyone else other than the US military and its support service employees permanently barred from even visiting these islands. So in practice if the Queen in her capacity either as private citizen of head of the state of the UK wanted to visit a territory of which she’s legally and constitutionally queen she couldn’t do so without the approval and permission of Washington. How sycophantic can the British government be?

Try to imagine a situation where Britain was allowed by the United States to set up an exclusive British military base on Puerto Rico for example and with or without the ethnic cleansing of the local Puerto Ricans insisted that no US Congress members, no US state governors, no member of the US Supreme Court or judiciary, no member of the incumbent US administration and, wait for it, the democratically elected President of the United States of America and Head of State, never mind that Puerto Rico is legally a US territory, couldn’t set foot on that island without the quite arbitrary say so of the British prime minister sitting in No. 10 Downing Street or one or both the UK houses of parliament.

We all know perfectly well what the US Congress and population at large would have to say about that. Yet this is precisely what the US dictates to a quisling Britain that readily accedes to and has consistently done so for over 50 years to its inhuman and arrogant demands. With their animals poisoned, crops destroyed and population forcibly removed from their homeland the people of the Chagos islands were initially dumped in Mauritius where they were left to exist in abject poverty and made most unwelcomed by the local people, but they’ve never given up the burning ambition within them to return home. Unbowed by the racial discrimination, these people are black, physical and psychological abuse that they’ve been routinely for over five decades been subjected to at the hands of the British and Americans the Chaggossians have sought legal redress through the British courts right up to the UK’s highest court the House of Lords, and despite prime ministerial appeals and challenges of their actions by the British Attorney General (a role similar to that in the United States at federal level) have impressively won their case each time, with the British courts stating quite unequivocally that the Chaggossians have an indisputable and fundamental right to return to their homeland; must be fully compensated by Britain in the same way that Germany was forced to compensate its Jews for their monstrous mistreatment; and it’s Britain’s responsibility to facilitate the physical return of the Chagossian people and the rebuilding of their homeland infrastructure that the British government wilfully destroyed in the 1960s as part of their pernicious mechanism to forcibly remove these people from their country.

But rather than democratically and lawfully comply with the decision of Britain’s highest and final court of appeal successive British prime ministers, notably Tony Blair and Gordon Browne, have instead invoked the Royal prerogative in order to negate the courts’ findings and have done so at the behest of the United States which is acting in the Chagos Islands as it has done throughout its continuous illegal occupation of that part of Cuba that the rest of the world knows as Guantanamo bay, refusing to leave even when it has been made abundantly clear by those whose ownership to the territories concerned is unquestionable that they’re not wanted. How thick-skinned, arrogant and utterly insensitive can one be? The Chagossians however have not given up their heroic fight to regain their islands and have lodged their case with the European Court of Human Rights to which Britain is a signatory. It’s widely believed that as in London they will win there too; but most interestingly from a moral perspective is how the Britain and the USA always preaching to others from their sanctimonious perch atop their self-centred, public soapbox about human rights and democracy will react; and just as importantly what the response of the so-called first world, international, exclusively white, western community will be.

That’s why I’m unashamedly and implacably opposed to these ostentatious and highly repulsive, politically motivated state love-ins, especially when through my taxes and no public consultations on the matter I must obligatorily pay for this self-congratulatory state of affairs. It’s claimed that the idea to invite Barack Obama to Britain on a state visit was the Queen’s; frankly I’m highly sceptical about that not least because every thing that’s officially done in the UK is done in the name of the monarch not the people, since officially like all other Britons I’m not a citizen of the United Kingdom but rather a subject of my country, and you don’t have to possess an Oxford PhD in English to fully understand the difference between these two terms: citizen and subject. That’s why Britain today in the 21st Century is still very much a class oriented society and why it is that the incumbent British PM and his cabinet are all toffs with privileged ancestral backgrounds. In other words their ancestors were greater savages, more tyrannical in their normal conduct and far more murderous in their pursuit of power and wealth than their average contemporaries were; so don’t confuse longevity in a specific role with moral imperatives. With this lot currently in power in the UK there’s no difference in their propensity for or the intensity of the barbarism that they are endemically capable of and that of their ancestors.

Besides, I’m equally deeply unmoved by any invitation to President Barack Obama even if it came from the Queen herself and I discovered that she was the instigator of it. Why? Queen Elisabeth II became Queen of the United Kingdom in 1952 on the death of her late father George VI while she was on holiday in what was then exclusively white minority dominated and controlled, massively indigenous black populated, colonial Kenya. There was still a large British Empire then although that would radically change as more and more colonies post-war either demanded and got or else fought for and won their liberty and independence from British colonial rule. But despite Elisabeth Regina having been on the British throne for 59 years, was and still is the monarch of a number of non-white countries and people notwithstanding those of her non-white subjects at home in the UK, Buckingham Palace as indeed all her other official and private residences are as Snow White as they could possibly be; all-white Caucasian preserves even down to the lowly lavatory cleaner in her employ.

Hardly an endorsement for citizen inclusivity I would say; and were one of her grandchildren, the future of her hereditary bloodline, no sane and sensible person black or white would want anything to do with her own biological brood, to indicate that he or she would like to marry a black or other non-white person regardless of how exemplary that person was and even if he or she was as British as Olympic and world champions Tessa Sanderson and Daley Thompson or other outstanding non-white Brits like Lewis Hamilton, Ian Wright the former England footballer or Dame Kelly Holmes double Olympic gold medallist in the same Olympic games, we all know in the wake of what happened to Princess Diana and Dodi what their fate would also be.

That of itself doesn’t negate the right of the Queen or the present government of David Cameron who thinks and publicly stated that multiculturalism in the UK is dead anyway and ought never to have been recognised in the first place, to invite people on state visits to Britain; I just think that they ought to be more open with the public as to why each specific state visit is necessary in the first place and then we the taxpayers and expected bankrollers of these lavish jaunts can have our say so long as we’re picking up that tabs that is on whether or not we think a particular state visit should go ahead or not. If we’re not footing the bill then from a personal perspective I don’t see that it’s any of my business or has anything whatsoever to do with me. But in the same way that you wouldn’t like to be forced into paying for a taxi to take me to my home but you’re excluded from that cab even though you live in the same direction as myself, don’t expect me to be elated when the state puts me in a similar unenviable and impossible position.

Besides, why on earth is Barack Obama being invited to Britain on a state visit, and furthermore at this particular moment in time? This apparent wolf in sheep’s clothing who is fostering more wars and killing gratuitously more people than his predecessor did is patently a warmongering quisling in the grip of the CIA; the Zionist lobbies and the military industrial complex that is repugnantly making billions of dollars daily out of creating chaos globally as well as systematically destroying the homes, lives and futures of vast numbers of the world’s populations; and rather than honouring this man with a visit among us, this country if it was willing to get up off its knees for just a single moment in its obsequious obeisance to the United States would be putting pertinent questions to a president whose country is universally hated around the world because of its insatiable greed, rank barbarism, rampant fascism, stark inequalities and endemic racism at home; an oppressive, Middle Ages prison system sadistically reinforced by a corrupt judicial one all the way up to the Supreme Court, its unconcern for the millions of non-white lives that it has globally snuffed out and carries on eradicating many more each day yet has the sheer audacity and temerity to lecture others on issues like democracy and universal human rights.

Would the Queen or any British government for that matter have extended a state visit invitation to Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or even the Prime Minister of independent Barbados where the Queen is still officially its Head of State? Not because of the personalities per se that run these countries but principally because each of them have done fantastic work in making phenomenal strides in the fields of education, health care and the personal awareness and empowerment of their own people. Barbados has a 100% literacy rate, Britain’s is 72%; Barbados has free, universal education from pre-kindergarten to postgraduate study level; over two thirds of Barbadians go into university and higher education and it was primarily Barbados’ sugar wealth that financed the English industrial revolution. Like Cuba the island has a free and universal health service that puts the British NHS: National Health Service to shame; and Venezuela is following a similar path. But do we reward countries like these with state visits and emulate them in what they’re doing; no way.

In marked contrast what has Barack Obama done other than bailout Wall Street whose members are a crucial constituent of those who routinely go through the revolving door which connects the White House and Wall Street; the very people who are responsible, though unintentionally so, of hastening the impending demise of a transparently corrupt and past its sell by date capitalist fiscal system; waging more wars and killing even more people than George W. Bush did? Is this really someone, his hands dripping with the blood of innocent children, mothers and senior citizens that we should be glad-handing and making welcome in our country? Who next; the savage butchers of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait? These are the people that Barack and Michelle Obama should be keeping company with, not gratuitously adding them to the coterie of our own barbaric savages like Nick Clegg, Cameron’s other cabinet ministers and David Cameron himself. Did you see the way how David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, that diminutive would-be Napoleon Bonaparte, were jumping around like two pathetic suitors who unexpectedly got laid by a gorgeous but bored out of her head piece of crumpet when the UN Security Council obsequiously gave them the green light to indulge their racist, colonialist, Zionist and imperialist propensity to invade another oil rich, non-white country while giving their armed forces the opportunity to use that country, in this case Libya, and its people as a live firing range?

This past week survivors of British atrocities carried out in colonial Kenya, all of them too horrific to describe in full here, turned up in London to determinedly pursue their court case for an apology and compensation from the British government for the multiple acts of barbarism practised against them and thousands of their compatriots who didn’t survive this infernal African holocaust. The less graphic of these incidents I can refer to but out of respect for the surviving men and women and their relatives and those of the dead I’ll desist from reporting the full catalogue of these heinous crimes.

Try to imagine yourself, your wife, children or elderly parents sadistically stockaded, doused with petrol, set alight and unable to set yourselves free excruciatingly burnt alive; having limbs severed with machetes and thus incapacitated being watched by your killers as you bled to death. Or how about being stripped naked, staked out in the broiling sun arms and legs apart and castrated with a dagger, and as you writhe in total agony have your abusers lay down a trail of sugar or molasses as an enticement to flesh eating ants and other insects to slowly and painfully finish you off. What was unspeakably done to Kenyan female detainees was just as barbaric with their vaginas used not only for systematic gang rape by these democracy-loving, civilized white men (little wonder they have paranoia about black men raping white women) but afterwards as whimsical playthings for the rifle butts of these British soldiers and torturers.

There’s every chance that the Kenyan litigants will win their court case as the contemporaneously documented details of these atrocities are huge in number and ex British officials and servicemen in Kenya who either saw firsthand or were themselves involved in what happened are voluntarily appearing as witnesses for the Kenyan victims, so struck are they by the dignity and forbearance of these survivors, but the British government on the other hand is dishonestly saying that the court case should properly have been brought against the Kenyan and not the UK government as Kenya is now an independent country; how sick can you be David Cameron? It was the colonial British authorities in Kenya that carried out these atrocities not a post independent Kenyan government as no Kenyan government existed at the time. And such an asinine argument on the part of the British government is akin to the Jewish survivors of the European holocaust being told by Angela Merkel or any other German government for that matter that the holocaust which the Germans carried out and compensation for it weren’t Germany’s fault or responsibility but should be laid squarely at the doorstep of the state of Israel.

We all know perfectly well how that would go down in Washington DC or with AIPAC; and no sane German politician hoping to make a career in politics or any public figure in that country for that matter would contemplate let alone advocate such a stance with white European Jews. But Blacks; who cares about them? Not even a black president of the world’s most powerful country it would seem and who is himself half black, whose black wife is a direct descendent, on both sides of her family, of Africans that were kidnapped and forcibly brought to the so-called New World including the future United States of America and involuntarily turned into slaves and Michelle, one would have thought, would have been more sensitive and understanding of such issues. How ironic is life!

The entire world knows that Barack’s mother was a white American woman and that he himself was born in Hawaii but on the paternal side of his family his ancestors are Kenyans and Africans. Furthermore, Grandfather Obama was a veteran of World War Two who freely like thousands of Kenyans and other Africans fought for Britain only to be arbitrarily arrested, unlawfully detained and savagely tortured by the British authorities in Kenya for wanting the same democracy and the right to rule themselves that he and others had fought and risked their lives, some of their fellow Africans actually paying the ultimate prize, to safeguard for Britons at home. But just as he has avoided visiting Kenya as President of the United States of America, something all previous US presidents have done as regards their ancestral homelands; just as he has cowardly stopped a US delegation from attending a UN conference on racism for fear of angering AIPAC, other Zionist lobbies and many of his pro-Israeli cabinet members as well as upsetting Israel whose racism it feared would have been brought up at the conference; and just as he has intentionally distanced himself from every issue at home in the United States that was essentially black no matter how justified it was, it’s a sure bet that this accomplished house slave President Barack Obama won’t be meeting these Kenyan torture victims who know his abused father and were fellow victims of his tortured grandfather, or will he be giving any high profile prominence to their case. It would seem to be a case of wrong colour; wrong continent; wrong holocaust!

Politics even when it’s conducted in what are transparently imperfect democracies and especially in those much vaunted democracies like the United States and UK that set themselves up and apart from others as paragons of virtue shouldn’t solely be about partisan, sectarian, racial, class or even gender issues to the detriment of everything else that accumulatively can assist a community and particularly a country in functioning cohesively; nor should it matter on that basis whether the head of state or the principal executive figure is a man or woman, or what race he or she belongs to. All previous US presidents have been white Caucasians and it’s truthful to say that without exception they’ve largely looked after the interests of this particular racial group and what rights and benefits they’ve ultimately legislated on behalf of non-Caucasians have been realized primarily through the efforts and struggles of these non-whites and often in the face of unyielding and invariably violent opposition and reprisals from white lawmakers, white dominated and often exclusively controlled courts and a judicial system similarly constructed as well as significant numbers of the Caucasian community itself. An important case in point of this in the United States is the Black Civil Rights Movement.

But because some progress has been made it doesn’t mean that the job is completed and things will automatically of their volition fall conveniently and satisfactorily into place; it just doesn’t happen that way, and for progress to be ongoing and truly meaningful vigilance, honesty and committed hard work must be relentlessly applied. It’s analogous in many ways to one earnestly hoping for a well manicured lawn that must be mowed and maintained on a regular basis else it’ll quickly fall into disrepair and become infested with weeds.

On Sunday the 10 April 2011 the heroic people of London proudly marked the 30th anniversary of the Brixton Uprisings when the capital’s Blacks having determined at the time that enough really was enough fearlessly and angrily rose up in their thousands and struck back violently at the racist Metropolitan Police Force that for well over two decades had profiled and systematically plagued the lives of black people in the nation’s heartland. Black men, women and children of all ages ran the daily risk of being summarily, unwarrantedly and often even forcibly stopped and searched as well routinely physically, verbally and psychologically humiliated in the process of this indignity being visited upon them; then if allowed to proceed on their way would once more find themselves subjected to the same stop and search abuse further down the road or street by another gathering of police thugs, with some of those that were picked on haplessly having to run the relentless gauntlet of this deliberately instigated and oppressive abuse for as many as eight or ten times in a day, even when those police officers that were personally involved in the stop and searches of these targeted victims knew perfectly well that they’d already been subjected to multiple searches earlier.

These “sus laws” as they came to be commonly known by the community at large understandably became widely hated because the police officers invoking them could and often did so on a whim, didn’t have to give any reasons for their actions to the persons stopped even when asked politely to do so and was actually carte blanche for the police officers concerned to openly and with impunity flout their racism knowing full well that they had tacit immunity from their bosses to do so. The only justification if seriously challenged by someone, let’s say a lawyer, that the police or equally their racist bosses felt they had to give and frequently came up with was that the police officer or officers intuitively suspected, hence the term “sus “, the person or persons stopped of being up to no good; and this without either providing or having to provide any evidence or proof for this. It was a farce and dishonesty par excellence, for how on earth could so many thousands of people all from the same ethnic background be so universally viewed by the police as “up to no good?”

What the police were also doing apart from overtly displaying their racism and demonstrating who form their perspective was in power was boosting their arrests figures. Not especially bright in the department of intellectual acumen but as white Caucasians males still possessed with the endemic belief that being what they were racially that made them superior to every black man, woman and child, these numskulls who in every way were analogous to the caustic and appropriate comments that President Lyndon Johnson openly voiced about the CIA couldn’t pour piss out of a boot even if that boot had instructions on the outside outlining what to do in that eventuality, were especially inept at catching real criminals and therefore needed to justify their jobs that were paid for at huge public expense, so picking on Blacks was an easy and lazy option for these dimwits. The end result being that scores of black people, particularly young black men and youths, were arrested on very trumped up charges, swiftly taken before magistrates, themselves a pretty nasty racist lot, in what were then police courts, and on every occasion convicted solely on the word of any police officer, most of whom were racist, psychotic, pathological liars, and irrespective of how exemplary a life that specific black person had lived or was currently living without any exception handed down a heavy custodial prison sentence, or in the case of black youths imprisoned in borstals.

It was a concerted plan to stigmatize and demonize black people as criminals who had a propensity to be lawless, irresponsible and intrinsically unsociable as a people, and intentionally setting out to establish this as fact created attendant consequences that then conspired to hamper blacks in many ways not least their employment chances, which when these became a reality and Blacks couldn’t get work as a result were used as a stick to dishonestly beat them, claiming that they were spongers off the state who were inherently work shy.

So Blacks were up against it no matter what they did, knowing that whenever they left their homes to go about their customary, legitimate and everyday business, like going to school, setting off for work, shopping, travelling or embarking on any of the other myriad things that these racist goons, their families and other whites did and took for granted they were going to be openly subjected to this humiliating stop and search with its accompanying abuse, and that a solitary word in protest at this unwarranted process they were routinely subjected to meant arbitrary arrest accompanied by the real possibility of a prison sentence handed out in a manner and with a severity that wouldn’t be considered appropriate if those before the court and even guilty of the offences of which these Blacks were falsely charged were white. In fact when the stench of the “sus laws” grew so badly that people nationwide were beginning to question them the lame excuse given by the police was that they were in place to stop terrorism.

This was the Seventies and Eighties and long before 9/11. Yes the Irish IRA funded by Americans and organisations there like Noraid were with some success carrying out their attacks on mainland Britain as well as Northern Ireland, but no one among the Irish of whom there are many not only in our nation’s capital London but also throughout the entire UK was ever subjected to these stop and searches that Blacks were, so that was a lie to begin with. And besides if there is anyone in the UK who can’t tell the difference between an Irishman or woman and a black individual as these idiotic police and their apologists on Conservative controlled London councils and even in parliament on the Conservative benches were suggesting then either racial integration in the United Kingdom has been so complete and colour really doesn’t matter as we’re all now colourless, or these guys saying this load of rubbish are some of the most outlandish, dishonest bunch of moronic, lying cretins that anyone could possibly come across; or else they were conveniently blind.

Realizing that no one in power or from outside their community was going to actively lift a finger to assist them and the answer to their redemption therefore laid in their own hands and squarely on their shoulders the entire black community of Brixton and its legion of local supporters, several of them white, similarly economically disadvantaged and working class publicly declared war on the police who in the ensuing fight that rapidly followed they gave a bloody good hiding to. Well done to them! Heartened by what they saw in Brixton spontaneous uprisings of other disadvantaged and picked on Blacks sprang up across the length and breadth of England, which to put it mildly found itself on fire. The rest is as they say history.

In the wake of this fight back and triumph on the part of Blacks the “sus laws” have been scrapped; so too the police courts where the police were both judge and jury, with those courts now renamed Magistrates’ Courts and the cosy links between their predecessors and the police permanently and thankfully severed. Irrevocably stripped of their authority and the rather abusive way in which this was recurrently implemented the police can no longer determine whether a case following an arrest that they made should go to court or not as was previously the case, and all cases must now be sent to the independent Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for review before any decision as to whether or not a prosecution is in order can be made, and it’s the CPS not the police that ultimately makes that decision. Significantly, Brixton the nub of all of this has been radically transformed and very much for the better. The Black and white community there is even more cohesive than before and immeasurably spurred on by the success of their heroic war are absolutely determined not to sit on their laurels. Once a decrepit, disadvantaged and stigmatized area Brixton is now a very desirable and much sought after residential and business locale in London serving not only as an inspiration to other black and disadvantaged areas throughout the country but as a beacon of what in the face of police brutality and abuse of power can be done if those on the receiving end of these have the courage and determination to stand up for their rights. That said the Blacks of Brixton and those across the UK know that although they’ve won a war the far more difficult task of managing the peace must still be confronted.

This doesn’t mean that racism which is now outlawed in the UK doesn’t exist any longer, far from it as it still exists; and is still there manifesting itself in subtler forms, but the really bad old days are a thing of the past not least because those with racist tendencies know that Blacks will not put up with their racism and will fight back and violently so if they have to. As a result we now have the truly amazing spectacle, unheard of only a short while ago, of Blacks entering the police force and moving up through the ranks – affirmative action is strictly forbidden and outlawed in all areas of life in the UK – to hold senior positions within it. The Chief Constable of Kent, not an area that that trips off the tongue as a place where Blacks normally live and which is 99.9% white, is Black as are some senior officers in the Metropolitan Police one their deadly enemy. Shows what can be done if there’s the will and people are treated solely on the basis of meritocracy and not the colour of their skin.

But every black person within the United Kingdom knows that it’s still a work in progress and that they can’t afford to become complacent, but they are none the less committed to what needs to be done. That’s why no black person across the political, economic and social spectrum that I have spoken to is enamoured by Barack Obama coming here to the UK on a state visit. When he ran for President every Black in the country was to a man and woman quite solidly behind him. Many of them campaigned openly and very passionately for him among Americans living in Britain and did everything in their power to persuade relatives and friends living in the United States and who are eligible to vote in US elections to raise money for and support this man. Their commitment could not have been more intense. But the mood has changed and changed drastically. Barack Obama is now seen as a sell-out and a big disappointment, and honestly I don’t know of any black person in the UK who wants to see him re-elected. There’s also quite predictably harsh criticism too for his wife Michelle who is all black and knows well the black experience but chooses these people say to turn her back on Blacks and pass herself off as white. And the chat is why have a black man in the White House if it’s going to be business as usual?

So the overwhelming sentiment is now one of stay away from the UK Barack, you’re not wanted here, as Blacks don’t want to sully their gains and successes earned through struggles with your presence among them. And it’s been suggested that if Barack and Michelle are simply too thick skinned to get the message and have the decency to cancel their visit under whatever pretext they choose to and the Queen won’t do so for fear of being branded a racist by the very same people in the white community: you know the usual Zionist, fascist, neo-con culprits that are endemic racists themselves but like to use racism as a political football to serve their perverse ends, then she ought to come up with one of two inventive excuses to get around this tricky impasse. She could cry off this visit by claiming she was suffering from delayed post-menstrual stress or else that she’d found out that Philip was having an affair, not as farfetched as it might sound if reliable anecdotal stories of his alleged past philandering stretching back for several decades are to be believed, and she was in no mood to play happy families with Barack and Michelle Obama.

My personal view on all of this is that every decent Briton should set a precedent and very publicly declare by whatever means that they have at their disposal to the world generally and to the United States of America in particular that this incumbent as well as all such future warmongering United States presidents, whatever their colour or the party they belong to, to be persona non grata. They say that you judge a person by the company that they keep and right now I don’t want my country keeping company with a fascist United States and doing so in my name. How about you? And if you don’t what are you tangibly going to do about it?