The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, made it abundantly clear yesterday that his government would take whatever steps were necessary to make Britain a safe place for minorities and that racial violence would be stamped out. His promises were made to a gathering of Sikhs celebrating the 300th anniversary of the founding of their faith. The British people displayed great forbearance through nearly three decades of unforgivable IRA bombings but the IRA campaign at least had a political aim of sorts. It was a campaign which was all too predictable and destined to get nowhere but its lessons have not been learnt by the White Wolves extremists who have laid claim to the indiscriminate ruthlessness of the racist bombing campaign which terrorises Britain today.
One of the pamphlets produced by the White Wolves states that "the lesson is clear. Violence gets results". In this, as in everything else, they are surely wrong. Violence got results in Nazi Germany, violence gets results in Kosovo. Hopefully the perpetrators of the violence against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians will come to rue their actions just as the Nazis did. But violence will not succeed in truly democratic countries, such as Great Britain, where mutual tolerance and respect is a creed subscribed to by the vast majority of the population.
The state of race relations in Great Britain is worrying, as indeed it is in this State with inexcusable hostility being shown daily towards travellers and immigrants. But Britain is afflicted with a range of far-right extremist groups who are bent on achieving their aims through anything but peaceful means. The murder of Stephen Lawrence was by no means an isolated incident; it was only the appalling manner in which it was investigated that brought it to public attention. The judiciary has accused the Metropolitan police force of institutionalised racism. Extremist bombers might not be easily caught. Their profile is said to indicate that they have few friends and are relatively intelligent. They use low-grade explosives which are normally associated with fireworks and are easy to come across. The bomb making technology is amateurish - but no less deadly for that - and is learnt off the Internet. Very few activists with a paucity of resources might sustain a bombing campaign of some considerable duration, unless they are captured.
A man is to appear before the West London Magistrates Court this morning charged with the murder of the three people who died following the bombing in Soho on Friday. If he was involved in the bombing, it is possible that he was behind the others and acted alone and that the claims of the White Wolves are spurious. However, police investigative work will have to be accompanied by a rigorous application of the laws against incitement to racial hatred. It is just as important that the bigots in British society be treated as such and, at the least, ostracised. Simultaneously, the Government must also do all that it can to encourage the tacit supporters of racist hate campaigns to realise that the nihilism of the far-right agenda has no place in Britain and will not be tolerated.