Now it's fashionable to berate asylum-seekers

I am not going to lose any sleep over the BNP winning its fifth seat in local elections. The happy winner of 679 votes in Mixenden, Yorkshire – Adrian Marsden – was once a strident member of Combat 18, the violent neo-Nazi group which threatens to kill, among others, black British sports stars who have the impudence to win medals for their country. But the BNP is only a useful distraction, just as the National Front was in the Seventies when Margaret Thatcher was ripping to shreds all ideas of social justice and equality.

Oh yes, everyone from right to left will wholeheartedly and piously agree that this is a very poor show indeed and that the BNP is very wicked. But this moral chorus is a cover, a fig leaf. The denouncers of the BNP are worthy people, yet at the same time they hold views on immigration and asylum-seekers which I find to be quite repugnant. Others do nothing while the country slides into a more hate-filled place than it was during the days of Enoch Powell.

Many of them are shameless too. They come up to me at parties – usually where there are hardly any other black or Asian invitees, which makes them believe, perhaps, that I am an honorary white – and discuss their anxieties that the national identity of this country cannot tolerate any more immigrant invasions. They regurgitate old civil- disorder arguments (echoing the discredited views of duplicitous politicians, past and present) that if we let in too many "ethnic minorities" True Brits cannot be blamed for rising against the incomers. Honestly, the number of canapés I have choked over recently. Do these appeasers not understand that for inconsolable small-minded nationalists, one black immigrant is one too many?

We have seen this before. These are the folk who rushed to enlist with the right-wing warriors who rose to fight against "political correctness", defined by them as any idea or policy that challenged the status quo. Today the same people appear to have found a new freedom, permission to express their distaste for the multi-racial Britain which they used to pretend to adore. Do they not understand that this nation has a restless soul which has forever sought diversity? The making and remaking of any nation is not an easy task, and you need real guts and conviction to press on with it. This country has never appreciated the extraordinary contributions of immigrants, the true stories about our collective histories, the need to make a new social contract between all the citizens and the state so that we know what we stand for.

Admittedly these are very hard times for black and white Britons with enlightened views on immigration and our national identity. Too many immigrants and their children are giving succour to racists by rejecting the best of British ideals, democracy for one. If I were a white pensioner living on a street in Bradford where Asian men, braggarts and brawlers, pimps and dealers, had taken over, of course I would reach out for the meanest part of me and hate the whole lot of them. The endless stories of Albanian and Turkish warring gangs; of black men and gun crimes; of hideously deformed (in their heads more than their limbs) mullahs who think they have the right to incite, in the house of God, young Muslim men to hate; and Algerians accused of making poisons and killing policemen, have created a new anger and hostility to our presence across British society.

Many of these anti-social activities are or have been carried out by white people, but it is always worse when non-white people are accused in a world where white power dominates. That does not make any of the above right or understandable. Criminals and zealots need to be condemned and I do that every day. But what I will not do is then make the reprehensible leap into the laps of those who hate all black and Asian immigration.

A thriving group of peddlers is now selling anti-immigration theories, rhetoric and sinister "research" to a receptive media. They can say the things that a nice BBC chap should never be heard saying. Whom do I mean? Why that Anthony Browne, previously a journalist who once so misrepresented my views on the "dangers" of rapidly reproducing black and Asian Britons (you know us, we unstoppable sex-and-birth machines) that I had to correct him on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Did I know then that he would soon become a guru promoting the fantasies of MigrationWatch, a unit of like-minded xenophobes?

Then there is Bob Rowthorn, the economist who believes that immigrants ruin the nation's sense of itself and are too clever, providing a little too much competition for the natives who simply give up on their entrepreneurial capacities. David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, agrees, he tells me, with much of this: "Any national community has an obligation to control the numbers and types of people coming in." And the leader most enamoured of these new prophets is David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who demands that black Britons should learn to behave like good little guests in his country.

I forgot to mention the celebrities – people like Stella McCartney and Toyah Wilcox – who have been supporting protests against centres for asylum-seekers. They may have had worthy reasons in their particular cases, but bit by bit the idea grows that these voiceless people, most of them unbelievably poor or damaged, are demons.

An even greater failure besmirches the fight of the just and the good for heterogeneity and equality. They have allowed the mainstream right to whip up the nationalist hysteria that is now resulting in a life of hell for refugees, asylum-seekers and economic migrants. They should be more robust in arguing for a properly managed economic migration, but instead they tremble when challenged.

The polemicist Melanie Phillips says that the recently arrested terrorists are asylum-seekers. Does that mean all asylum-seekers are terrorists? Other beraters of asylum-seekers include Brian Sewell, Richard Littlejohn (whose television programmes I will not touch on – I would rather sit on blocks of dry ice) and Gary Bushell; and media proprietors such as Richard Desmond whose daily attacks on refugees in the Daily Express are more pornographic than any naked breasts in his dirty magazines. Why this abysmal capitulation? Why is the BBC not asking Mr Blunkett again and again why he is deporting three-quarters of the Iraqis applying for asylum on the grounds that Iraq is safer than they claim?

The manufacturing of anti-asylum prejudice can be challenged. Look at Marie Claire this month. It has a six-page feature on the lives of three asylum-seekers, plus facts which you rarely see: that nine European countries take more refugees than we do and that asylum-seekers live on £38 per week.

We need our mainstream novelists and playwrights to move their eyes from the First World War and tell us stories of these new human tragedies right here in our backyards. In Stephen Frears' shattering film Dirty Pretty Things, the hero, an African refugee doctor played by the phenomenal Chiwetel Ejiofor, says something like: "But we are the ones who clean your hotels and your hospitals... You don't see us, you don't want to." It is this unwillingness to see and speak that is the greatest danger, not the pitiful BNP.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk