Posted on 06/24/2002 6:42:37 AM PDT by kattracks
June 24— By Pete Harrison
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is racist to the core, according to its chief prosecutor, whose views have emerged in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday.
Asked if all Britons were racist, Sir David Calvert-Smith said "Yes," prompting the Prime Minister's office and the Commission for Racial Equality to swiftly play down his remarks.
"The whole of society has a problem," Calvert-Smith, who was knighted earlier this month, told BBC radio.
The 57-year old Director of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is currently investigating his own service, under fire for failing to secure a conviction for the murder of 10-year-old Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor.
Taylor bled to death on a run-down London housing estate two years ago from a bottle wound to his leg.
Calvert-Smith's assertion was swiftly rebutted by a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair. "I don't think we would agree with that sentiment," he said, adding: "We would accept there are challenges for society as a whole."
While Britons readily cheered the English football team's black stars in the World Cup, the country is undergoing a process of soul-searching after race-rioting in the north last year and in the face of a big influx of asylum seekers across the Channel.
Calvert-Smith said that while his organization and the police had already admitted to "institutionalized racism," the rest of society was in denial.
"Whether we are talking about asylum, whether we are talking about sport even, there are various stereotypical assumptions made," he said.
The CPS found itself guilty of racial prejudice last year in its own Denman Report, while the police were branded racist by the MacPherson report into the investigation of the killing of black teen-ager Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death at a London bus stop in 1993.
The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) said Calvert-Smith's remarks were in contrast to its own survey last month, which found 86 percent of Britons believed "you don't have to be white to be British."
"Of course racism is still a sad factor of society," said a CRE spokeswoman, "But we're certainly moving on."
Ethnic minority groups accounted for 6.4% of Britain's population or 3.6 million people in 1997, according to the Labor Force Survey (LFS) -- an increase of 0.6% since 1995.
Copyright 2002 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved.
"Myself excepted, it goes without saying."
If we're all racist, then we might as well sit back and enjoy it, and bugger the lot of them!
Most people dont like people who don't like them, or thier 'kind' - whatever that happens to be - and thats a GOOD THING... it keeps those people apart... and happy.
How utterly brilliant.
What is sinful is to demonize people for doing what they have to to be happy.
What is evil is to use government as an arena, a forum, and a weapon to degrade and champion human beings in a ridiculous cockfight, a vain sadomasochistic spectacle held to purge our collective imperfections -- bleeding the patient to cure him.
We still hover like flies around the ancient idea of human sacrifice, only now it is so disjointed and psychological that it has become a jihad, an exorcism, an emotional lobotomy of any behavior that makes a man unfit to be molded into a lifeless, spiritless PERSONOID.
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