There is something of the night about him
Michael Howard, that is, as Daniel over at Crooked Timber points
out while talking about Howard’s plans for Gypsy/Travellers camp
sites and defending the remarks of Labour MP Kevin MacNamara, who found them to have the “whiff of gas chamber” about them:
If you are planning to create legislation to with the intention of making an ethnic group into second class citizens, and you know that this ethnic group has historically been the victim of extremely serious persecution, and you are doing so in order to jump onto a newspaper bandwagon which is stirring up hatred of this group, then you are planning to do something which is a) very wrong indeed and b) really quite similar to what the government of Germany did between 1934 and 1945. Nazi comparisons are overdone, but some policies actually are ?quite like the Nazis?, and denying civil rights to Gypsies is one of them.
There certainly is a ?whiff of the gas chambers? about this, the Gypsy Council also thinks that there is, and Kevin MacNamara should be congratulated for having the courage to say it out loud; God knows that there are no votes in it as Gypsies aren?t very well represented on electoral registers. Michael Howard might or might not find Nazi comparisons particularly wounding given that his family were Jewish refugees from the Nazis, but if he does, then all one can say is, well let him bloody well be offended then. He?s planning on changing the law so as to facilitate the removal of people from land that they own by force and the destruction of their homes, and he?s backing a really quite virulent campaign in the Sun and the Mail, so he can wear it. Note that nobody?s called him a Nazi; just this particular policy, because it is. Everyone else?s dumping of litter, petty theft and what have you is kept under to control by the criminal law of England and Wales plus the occasional ASBO, so to claim that there is any particular problem with respect to Gypsy communities is to claim that there is something particularly and congenitally criminal about them. That?s racism, if anything is, so Howard can wear that one as well.