British National Party (BNP) Parliamentary candidate Bob Bailey ran into a group of three Desi toughs in East London while campaigning earlier today, and the following is the result:
If you look at the reaction in the YouTube comments, as well as in the coverage of the story at the Daily Mail, there is an overwhelming consensus by readers that the Asian “thugs” got what was coming to them.
And yes, it’s hard to deny that the smaller South Asian kid in black started the physical altercation by spitting in Bob Bailey’s face. Unfortunately, the commenters on these sites are using the incident to unleash wads of racist bile… Pretty disgusting to read.
At least at Pickled Politics, the commentary on the incident is more sane. My favorite comment there is “Platinum786,” who writes: “If someone spits at you and you punch them, fair enough it’s almost instinct. If that leads to someone punching you back, pushing you, you fight back, again that is instinct. Once they’re on the ground, kicking them, that’s BNP” (link)
My own question is this: what exactly was Bob Bailey saying as the youths approached him on the street? My suspicion is that they thought he was accusing them of being “robbers,” but he may not have intended to say that. Can anyone work it out?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter that much — a brawl is still a brawl. But I can’t help but wonder: was this thing was the result of a misunderstanding caused partially by British accent differences?
Update: Here’s a little bit of backstory on Bob Bailey. Quite the character! (Now I understand better why he was on foot to begin with…)
i have to disagree with you here. If you spit on someone – all bets are off. In fact if anything the respone was very weak to the provocation. Would your response have been the same if the attackers were white kids while the pollie was black or desi. What if someone had spit on Obama? the media would be screaming racism ( very correctly). As a brown immigrant in a foreign country every Faisal and brown thug hurts me personally 🙂 in still disagree with you. and no, race does no have anything to do with my viewpoint (and more than a bit insulted that you assumed it would). plus, the fact that this guy was a BNP candidate puts the race issue in a slightly different context. and i still think the response was not only disproportionate, but completely unbecoming of and acceptable for somebody who is running for a public legislative office.
the BNP started the fight by attempting to ban the Quran and trying to drive out south asian immigrants. the clip is out of context and we dont know what may or may not have happened before… kids are not justified, but surely we can recognize their pain and relate it to that of latinos in AZ.
is the spitting justified? no do i blame him for spitting? no
btw what are we basing calling them “thugs” on? i see kids working on their doctorates dressed and just as passionate as these kids on college campuses around where i live on a weekly basis
I think we can agree to disagree. Do you expect the pollie to grin and take it – I dont agree. Next time that kid will think several times before spitting. No insult intended 🙂
melbourne desi,
If your point is, don’t start a spitting match unless you can finish it, I’m with you. But do tone down your immigrants living off the dole rhetoric, it’s getting tiresome – yeah, yeah, you made it the ‘right’ way and so you feel rather entitled to your Aussie citizen/resident status. Good on you. So what? Good luck reading the Murdoch press. Go vote for Pauline Hanson while you’re at it, may be you’ll feel rather more like a real Aussie.
PAfD (#2),
Dude, you amuse me… remember, in Britain, all browns are Pakis. Doesn’t matter what happens across the pond. May be things have changed post 7/7, I don’t know. Not a great deal, I suspect.
I think we can agree to disagree. Do you expect the pollie to grin and take it – I dont agree. Next time that kid will think several times before spitting. No insult intended 🙂 clearly, the only opinion is to agree to disagree. of course i did no expect him to be polite and grin. but it is shocking that in all he comments i have read, including yours, walking away has not been offered as an option. and if not walking away, mitigating. bailey took this skirmish to an entirely new level. and, unfortunately for bailey (and maybe for you) you’ve just condoned bailey, and people like him, not to think twice about unnecessarily throwing punches in a similar, or even less provocative, situation.
Dude, you amuse me… remember, in Britain, all browns are Pakis.
Its funny you should mention that; I’ve often advocated that we should “reclaim” the world “Pki”..
Turn it from a term of abuse into an ethnic pride sort of thing; how we’re “arrived” in this country. I mean we Asians/Desis punch FAR above our weight in Britain and huge contributors to the economy..
“NF types ate working class blue collar chav stupid worthless trailer trash who blame non whites for all their insecurities.”
I really hate this kind of talk. It implies that education & wealth can magically cure racism. They just produce a more genteel, more ruthless racism.
Indians can’t even throw a decent punch! An old geezer like that should never get the best of anyone under 30.
Ugh, Amardeep. The comments on the Daily Mail are disgusting. What’s even worse were some comments on a brit newspaper article on Eugene Terreblanche. The commenters seemed to suggest that South Africa was vast empty uninhabited land, with blacks moving in only AFTER the whites had developed it. Now this may be true, but to claim that whites should therefore have the right to rule SA? A stretch, considering they were probably traders as opposed to laborers who actually built the place and yet received a hugely disproportional recompense. Johann Hari’s articles on Dubai also seemed to suggest that many Brits were almost comfortable with a paternalistic sort of racism there. Perhaps with the Brits it isn’t even racism, it’s more like feudalism coupled with a strong history of class barriers. In my opinion as a DBD who lives in the US and has travelled in the UK, Americans are far more uncomfortable with racism than the Brits. I wonder if others will agree.
^AHAHAHAHA. I assume you’re talking about the self-same USA that stole land from the Native Americans, even had bison slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands to drive them away, the same USA where only recently legislation legalizing racial profiling has been passed (Arizona), the same USA where ‘ethnic studies’ has just been banned from schools so that Latinos won’t ‘learn to hate whites’ (same Arizona)….
Are you f’ing kidding me?
Actually the last thing the Indian immigrants in Uk should do is try to ‘reclaim’ “paki” Stats show that indian immigrants do vastly better in almost all areas than pakistani and bangladeshi immigrants. So ethnic equalization is simply a way for pakistanis to shore up their reputation and bring down the indians’.
In Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani, one character, Hardjit, says this while beating up a white boy who called him a Paki —
“A Paki is someone who comes from Pakistan. Us bredrens who don’t come from Pakistan can still b call’d Paki by other bredrens if it means we can call dem Paki in return. But u people ain’t allow’d 2 join in, u get me?”
But the novel’s narrator clarifies —
“All a this sh*t was just academic a course. Firstly, Hardjit’s thesis, though it was what Mr Asherwood’d call internally coherent, failed to recognise the universality a the word Nigga compared with the word Paki. De-poncified, this means many Hindus an Sikhs’d spit blood if they ever got linked to anything to do with Pakistan. Indians are just too racists to use the word Paki.”
I think I get the point of the above, but it is also a generalization. Desi relations between punjabis is everywhere complicated.
metal mickey, let’s be clear on this. I didn’t say the USA was perfect. In fact, I had a harrowing experience (that got me close to tears) at the immigration line coming back in to the US just four days ago. I’m brown, but it would be exceedingly hard to pin this down on race. I’m a petite woman who showed annoyance at the immigration officer’s (young Italian American guy, perfectly charming at first) ridiculous line of questioning (why was I traveling alone, was I single?), and that set him off. Testosterone, sigh.
My thesis is simply this. Americans tend to be more uncomfortable with class or race divisions than Brits. Argue that point if you care to. As you well know, public opinion doesn’t favor the AZ law. But much as I despise the AZ law, you’ll have to admit it’s a huge stretch for you to claim that the law ‘legalizes racial profiling’. A very Palinesque comparison.
Racial profiling has shaky legal ground in the US and can be contested in court, but try seeking legal recourse in Germany if you’re Arab and have a hard time renting a place. Or seeking recourse as a Nigerian living in India who keeps getting hauled off to the cops on suspicions of drug smuggling. So yeah, the USA is far from perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot fairer than most other places.
So no, I am not f’ing kidding you.
LMAO, you think that Germany doesn’t have a constitution, or what? And, um, don’t lecture me on what it’s like to live in Western Europe, OK? Do you base your comments on fact, or prejudice?
I want to make my point clearer, it is totally pointless to point fingers at different Western countries over who is more racist or not. Rather that energy should be put into combatting racial prejudice in one’s own country. From an outsider’s POV, there is enough of that to go around in the USA.
Um, mickey, I don’t wish to lecture you on anything, including your rudeness. You haven’t really argued any of the points I was making, and I’m not willing to engage in debate with a troll who goes LMAO, and AHAHAHA. Have a nice day.
I’m sorry, what was your ‘point’ again? I’m afraid it got lost in the barrage of baseless assumptions in both your posts. Do you have any facts, other than generalisations about ‘class divisions’ and all? If challenging your offensive assumptions makes me rude, so be it. But it shows you don’t belong on the internet.
In other words, do you have any proof at all that Americans are more uncomfortable with race divisions than the Brits? Or is that also very rude of me to ask?
To me, it seems on the other hand very racist to ask people to fill in their race on every damn form just as in the USA. What purpose does this exactly serve, that institutions of all sorts need to know whether one is Indian, African-American, Native, or otherwise? This does not exist in Britain, or mainland Europe. I’m quite sure it has to do with WWII, when the Nazis could just pick off the government registrations who is Jew and who is not! This phenomenon (recording race) is definitely something that many Europeans are uncomfortable with. Make of that what you will.
For the desi boys in the video: please learn how to fight! If you’re going to act like a badboy, then at least be one. This was embarrasing.