Global families (From Dudley News)

Global families

3:02pm Wednesday 20th June 2007 in Letters

I HAD intended to put down my pen regarding Dudley community relations.

Over the past weeks we have explored every nuance and inflection of these matters with the unfortunate result that divisions are actually wider now than when the discourse began.

However the distortions, I believe deliberate distortions, present in Stewart Kettle's letter cannot go unchallenged.

These issues have nothing to do with race.

The term race' is used to define the broad divisions within the human race that govern hair and skin type, colour of eyes, certain superficial personality traits etc. and no rational person would ever claim social advantages or disadvantages to be inherent in these criteria.

The various human types developed in geographic isolation and if the world had always had the mass communication and transport systems it now possesses it is likely that we would now live within my ideal of a global family of mankind.

I am a jazz fan and my boyhood heroes were all as black as coal!

You really are writing rubbish, Mr Kettle.

The problems we face are created by man and become manifest in the form of sectarian and cultural divisions of one kind or another that originally developed in isolation.

My point has always been that we can only create a level playing field for ALL regardless of race, colour or creed, by ignoring such divisions which, as I have said many times before, have no place in public life and have the potential to undermine the rule of law.

By accusing me of inciting racial tensions it is you, Mr Kettle, who have crossed reasonable barriers.

This is a very serious accusation indeed, made all the more annoying because naivety of this kind plays directly into the hands of Britain's many enemies who have actually been granted increased elbow room as an unfortunate result of the Race Relations Act.

John Morton
Dudley