Hastings Comes to Terms With Itself

Much of the tone of this blog has been fairly light hearted commenting on happenings in the community sector in Hastings. None of that today, as the whole town is coming to terms with a truly awful incident in which a visiting language student from Qatar was killed over the weekend.

There is huge media interest and some of the early reporting was wildly inaccurate. A racist incident in or outside a kebab house led to a chase and then, depending on which report you read, a serious assault or a fatal fall. There is much debate about whether there is a problem with racism in the Town. In terms of the majority of people I would say absolutely not but there is an under-belly of the most awful racism and xenophobia in the Town which shows its ugly face from time to time. When we used to publish BME News I used to get personal racist hate-mail and there is clearly a number of hard-core racists out there. The BNP target Hastings during election periods and at the last election they gained a higher proportion of the vote than during previous times. There is also a lot of grief faced by ethnic workers in fast food outlets and late night garages. A little while ago I called for the kebab houses and fast food outlets to be embraced by the Council's Bar Watch ("banned from one banned from all") to show solidarity with those who run and work in them. This was being 'looked into'.

As far as the future is concerned I sometimes think that it is a time for honesty an realism and for the Town to come to terms with what this all means. There is much political denial defending the Town against the media claims made about it which, I guess, is appropriate. But in this there is also a need to face the facts and I am reminded of a comment made about bullying in schools - simply put, it asserted that a school which took a view that bullying "doesn't happen here" simply became a delay to the problem being addressed.

Thanks for reading - now watch this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mB3pDYTne0