Racism IS still a problem, Mr Farage and wanting to scrap anti-bias laws shows just how deluded UKIP are

It’s official: racism in Britain has ended.

That’s according to Nigel Farage, who says UKIP would scrap the now “irrelevant” anti-discrimination laws the country first adopted in 1976.

In an interview for Channel 4 with former equality and human rights commissioner Trevor Phillips, he said the laws barring race bias were outdated.

“I think the employer should be much freer to make decisions on who she or he employs,” he said.

“I think you should be able to choose on the basis of nationality, yes. I do.”

“If we’d sat here 40 years ago, having this conversation, your point [on the need for anti-discrimination laws] would probably have been valid. I don’t think it is today.”

And, of course, who would know better to say that racism has ended than an old white man whose party’s support base is 98% white?

The absurdity of Mr Farage’s claim beggars belief.

It comes only a day after it was revealed that the number of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds who have been unemployed for more than a year has risen by 49% since the coalition came to power in 2010.

At the same time, there was a fall of 1% in overall long-term youth unemployment and a 2% fall among white people aged 18 to 24, according to figures released by the Office of National Statistics.

This statistic alone shows that even with the Race Relations Act in force, white Britons like myself still benefit at the expense of ethnic minorities.

So scrapping this law, which Labour introduced 39 years ago and then amended in 2001, will only reinforce the advantage already enjoyed by the majority.

And, even if you ensure that only foreign citizens can be discriminated against, how will scrapping anti-bias laws not also hurt British minorities?

Yet, just like UKIP know, Mr Farage’s suggestion will be very popular and reasoned arguments like mine will be shouted down by his vocal supporters.

Sadly, we live in a country today where dangerous myths can be planted in very fertile ground and the currency of spite is soaring in value.

According to UKIP, it is white, working class men who are the real victims in our society, falling prey to a devilish system of political correctness that favours black, disabled, lesbian women – but there is, of course, no evidence to support this.

Working class, white men are victims, yes, but chiefly of deluded right-wingers like Mr Farage, who wants to exploit their fear of immigration while further entrenching privilege by handing the rich tax cuts, scrapping employment rights and axing public services.

The Tories, meanwhile, tell us that Britain’s problems are due to a bloated benefits bill and nothing at all because of an over-reliance on the finance industry, crony capitalism, spending cuts and other policies that are helping to erode tax revenues from lower and middle earners.

It is this popular yet mythical mindset that ensures that there are ten times as many government officials investigating benefit fraud as there are probing tax-dodgers.

To simply demonstrate why this is wrongheaded, one only has to point out that benefit fraud costs Britain £1.2billion annually, while the money lost to the state through taxpayers not paying as much as they should was at least £34billion (according to the most recent HMRC figures) and may be as high as £119billion (Tax Research UK’s estimate).

Yet, for an increasingly large number of people, the only thing that matters is punishing "scroungers" beneath them.

So, rather than properly addressing tax avoidance following the HSBC scandal earlier this year, David Cameron instead responds with a new benefit crackdown and, in the words of comedian David Mitchell, “announced policies that made life harder for the weak (the fat, poor, young or drug-addicted) in an odd spirit of righteous joy”.

And the recent upswing in Tory support and the solidity of the UKIP vote in the polls shows that bashing the most vulnerable is enormously popular.

Britain’s mood has turned very ugly indeed and I won’t be surprised if all the laws and systems we put in place to protect the weakest are torn down in years to come.

The real question is, however, how long will we put up with the delusion that racism, class discrimination and other social ills have been fixed and that spite is right?