Michael Howard

There was an interesting placement of stories in The Observer yesterday. On the left side of one page was a story about anti-semitism in Britain, in which Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality said that there is a common attitude in Britain that Jews are not "our kind of people." Next to this story was a piece about the Conservative party's anti-immigration stance, in which Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, a British Jew, "raises the spectre of race riots" to support his case for reducing immigration to Britain. You would think that someone of Howard's background, of all people, would know better than to stoke people's xenophobia to make a point.