Who is going to move next door

Twitter spat between Sunder Katwala (British Future) and Labour turncoat and Daily Telegraph lackey Dan Hodges over the legitimacy of silencing UKIP with the "racist racist racist" technique that has been used so successfully by the left in the past.

As someone who, as a child, experienced black people moving next door (both sides) I can assure Mr Hodges that it does produce very real problems - a huge amount of stress for existing residents as they realise they are becoming a minority and will have to walk to their homes through groups of "exuberant" teenagers; a big increase in noise and multiple occupancy; the abandonment of front garden cultivation (which meant the area soon looked unrecognisable); the use of residential areas for commercial operations (factories set up in front rooms, car servicing companies set up in former front gardens, taxi companies set up in the street); an increase in crime and the fear of crime (children of our Afro-Caribbean neighbours on one side were in a feud with the children of an Asian family two doors down on the other side which led to stone throwing over the intervening back gardens and the collateral smashing of my parents' greenhouse); a fall in house prices which puts you into negative equity so there is no possibility of moving away.

Usually the people this happens to are poor and uneducated (I had an appalling education at Icknield High School in Luton and left at 16 with no meaningful qualifications) and cannot articulate their experiences in such a way that ultra-privileged media types like Dan Hodges (the son of a famous actress and politician, with a consequent opening of doors and smoothing of his path in life) can recognise.

Therefore such complaints are dismissed as "racist".

However I would refer Mr Hodges (and Mr Katwala for that matter, for he is by no means a disinterested observer) to 2009 and the so-called Gurkha Justice Campaign in which actress Joanna Lumley (a good friend of former Conservative MP Giles Brandreth) confronted Labour Minister Phil Woolas.  At that time the Guardian newspaper (the Guardian!) said in an Opinion Editorial (an Opinion Editorial! in the Guardian!) that Joanna Lumley's house was so big it did not matter who lived next door.  So please do not tell me Mr Hodges and Mr Katwala that the issue of who is going to move next door is a complaint only made by ignorant racists.