The paranoia and fear about refugees (or "asylum seekers" as the gutter press insists on calling them, allowing the reader to silently add "bogus" to the beginning of the phrase, in the way their newspapers so often do) is growing to ridiculous levels. This report from the BBC shows how that fear is manifesting itself. A fairly innocuous proposal to house an office issuing documents to refugees in a town near Bristol (a major British city, with a good multi-racial population) leads to protests. The residents, apparently fear that up 50 people a day will travel through their neighbourhood to visit the office. One woman is quoted as saying "I'm not against them coming here as such. But they should not be permitted to wander around the country without some kind of regulation." Excuse me? Another man says "I personally abhor bigotry. But if visitors to this centre are allowed to walk through the estate, that is just not on", and a second man says that he is neither bigoted nor racist but concerned" whether his children could play outside anymore. Hello? What do they think these people are? This isn't Sunnydale. These people passing through aren't demons and vampires. They are simply people who were forced to flee their own countries for one reason or another. At worst, they might be ordinary people attempting to immigrate to Britain.

I make a point of not reading the tabloid newspapers, but I can't help but see the daily headlines. In those, refugees are depicted every single day as rapists, murderers, gangsters, pedophiles and thieves. No one, in the tabloid's eyes, ever has a legitimate reason for being a refugee. Every one of them is evil and waiting to prey on the poor, innocent, law-abiding and white citizens of this country. You see, under the banner of apparent concern about "bogus" asylum seekers, racism has found a new, easy outlet that speaks to frightened people. The refugees are different. They look different, sound different, behave in different ways. To someone raised on the diet of fear that the tabloids put forth, these outsiders are demons. They need slaying, or at least keeping out. Racism is fast gaining a new cohort of disciples, and neither the govenment nor the opposition parties are willing to stand up to it. In fact, they encourage it with their talk of "clamping down" on refugees and preventing them reaching the country.

And it's not just the government. The police refuse to act either. Quite blantantly, a few weeks ago, a chief constable said that the police did not want to use their powers to stop racist provocation for the simple reason that some of the newspapers might be breaching laws against inciting racial hatred. To me, that seemed like a good reason to use the laws, both against racist groups and the newspapers who are doing their best to encourage racism with its new mask.