I have a confession to make: I am a bigot.
Let me explain. I voted Remain in the EU referendum and was angry, upset, dismayed, asthmatic at the result. For me it was a binary choice, the ballot paper looked like this:
ARE YOU RACIST?
WOULD YOU LIKE TO THINK YOU MIGHT NOT BE RACIST?
This view, and the way I voted has its roots not in urban or student politics, but in a Church of England primary school in North Somerset in the early 1970s. I can remember being told in assembly by our head teacher Mrs Hutchcroft that we should treat people the same regardless of the race, colour or creed. I had to ask what ‘creed’ meant.
Ours was an almost entirely white village, aside from the family who ran the Chinese takeaway. Even my secondary school had, when I was there, ONE black pupil, and even then only temporarily. So perhaps it was an easy statement for my head teacher to make. But her words stuck with me, I can even picture where I was sitting cross-legged in the hall and the smell of the varnish and school dinners.
Stunned yesterday by finding myself one of the 48%, I concluded that 1 in 2 of us in this nation is just not a very nice person, possibly racist. It was a binary question that revealed our view of ourselves and what kind of country we want to be.
People are saying we need to ‘reach out’ to the 52% and understand them. But what if I think they are wrong? What if I refuse to accommodate racist, inward-looking views? Why should I? I feel like the residents of Craggy Island asking Father Ted “should we all be racists, now father?”
So why am I a bigot?
Dictionary definition:
having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one’s own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others.
That’s sounds like me.