What astonishes most of us immigrants, is the way that a sliver of liberal opinion appears to regard "Englishness" with suspicion or scorn.

The greater danger with hurling such accusations at anyone - and in this I include, albeit with some hesitation, Martin Amis - is that we risk alienating what I suspect is a substantial portion of the public who have such concerns but are not actually racist. By saying everyone who challenges the orthodoxy about the untramelled benefits of multiculturalism and immigration is racist we devalue the term to the point of rendering it meaningless. Those who believe that modern life is not rubbish, that the benefits of immigration outweigh the alleged drawbacks should surely have enough confidence in their arguments to make the case rather throwing the R-word around. The case for a modern British identity, one composed of many colours and cultures cannot be very strong if it cannot even withstand the sceptism of Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

Geoff, i don't have a scanner anymore...I wish I could scan it in.

I had heard that Mozza's latest diatribe was a carefully de-contextualised stitch-up by the NME, trying to make him look like a flag-waving xenophobe. So I bought the magazine to read the piece for myself, and unless the quotes are actually fabricated, I can't come to any conclusion other than him being a flag-waving xenophobe. Who says he lives abroad because British taxes are too high and because all the foreigners in Britain are diluting the national identity.

Eek.

Anyone else read it and have observations?

(apologies if this has been covered elsewhere - I couldn't find it.)

Morrissey, though, has been on a loop about immigrants for nearly two decades now. Central to The Smiths iconography was a lament for the decline of the post-war consensus in Britain. It was ironic that while Morrissey championed the kitchen sink dramas of the Sixties (A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Billy Liar etc) as a forlorn counterpoint to garish Eighties Britain, originally these dramas bemoaned the changes of 1950s Britain and were already nostalgic for a mythical ‘Old Britain’ themselves. While many leftish journalists indulged such twaddle, the logic of this tunnel-visioned, Little England outlook is to start bemoaning changes brought about by mass immigration, too. And that, of course, is precisely what Morrissey started to do.

Leaving aside Moz’s infamous ‘reggae is vile’ jibe from 1985, the first major controversy was around the track, ‘Bengali In Platforms’, from his 1988 debut solo album Viva Hate. But it was the furore surrounding his appearance at Finsbury Park supporting ska band Madness, wherein he waved a Union flag in front of a montage of skinheads, that caused the NME to ask on its frontpage ‘Flying The Flag or Flirting With Disaster?’ back in August 1992. Unusual at the time, but the debacle also made headlines beyond the music press. The mainstream media’s engagement with the controversy was a sign of how ‘anti-racism’ was starting to be used to create new moral codes in wider society.

Although the left’s stern ‘acceptable/non-acceptable’ codes in the Eighties (which often meant referring to people or ideas as ‘ideologically sound/unsound’) were routinely ridiculed by the Tory tabloid press, by the early Nineties this kind of thinking was gradually being co-opted to forge a new conformist etiquette and behaviour code. The year after the Morrissey/Finsbury Park debacle, the BBC started promoting ‘anti-racism awareness’ on Radio One and the NME publicly backed the re-launched Anti-Nazi League and their populist ‘Anti-Racist’ music festivals.

Since then, the NME has been at the forefront of the new conformism, as they have revealed during the latest Moz ‘controversy’. ‘We’re really nice people, we’re committed anti-racists, you know?’ seems to be the NME’s chest-puffing response to it all. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t pop stars – generally not known to be the brightest bunch – often spouted ill-informed garbage? Who can forget boy band Blue’s belief that dolphins were now sadly neglected because of all the ‘fuss’ over 9/11 fatalities? Or, my particular favourite, female grunge outfit L7, who argued that men go to war because ‘it’s their way of emulating female menstruation’? And then there is the long documented flirtation with Nazism that David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Keith Moon would use to generate headlines and record sales.

fuck me, a place/time that damon hasn't been to.

I'm sure the reactions from everyone on here (including a certain Mr Bragg) would have been far more vitriolic if someone such as Robbie Williams, Rod Stewart or Eric Claptout had made the same comments

oh fuck off

I find it interesting that Moz has become an immigrant himself by choosing to live in Italy. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong eith that.

I'd put money on Billy being at the Roundhouse gigs

Sadly work commitments mean I can't go

I never implied that he did.