LAST week's Citizen Smith column "Baying tabloids threaten national sporting pride" turned out to be prophetic. A couple attacked in Trafalgar Square because their car was made in Germany and a Russian student stabbed in Sussex because he for 'foreign' were just two of many incidents of xenophobic violence.
As Citizen Smith rightly noted, sections of the tabloid press encouraged this jingoism. The tone of some of the gutter journalism would not have been out of place in Nazi Germany.
We need only look at the former Yugoslavia to see how name-calling and jingoism can rapidly develop into ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
The down market tabloids are intoxicated with their own power. Those in charge care nothing for the people who suffer as a result of their hysterical jingoism.
Those responsible should be dismissed - but, of course, this will not happen.
Bob Hayes
Press and publicity officer
Blackburn and District Trades Council
Tontine Street
Blackburn
Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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