Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Where is the shame over this tide of filth?

I am utterly depressed. For the past couple of years, racism has been rehabilitated and all that national soul searching brought in by New Labour with the (Stephen) Lawrence report in 1999 has been washed away. The shame and people really understanding how racism carries on has been washed away.

That report held institutions and gatekeepers to account. It wasn't saying you could ever get rid of people's feelings about one another, but institutions in progressive democracies don't live by that rule and shouldn't. I thought we had learnt that. I thought that key institutions had ingested what needed to be done about racism and why it is an evil.

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What do we have to do? The Labour Home Secretary - three home secretaries on from Jack Straw, who gave us the Lawrence report - stands up and says he wants to stop foreigners taking our benefits and using our health service. Why didn't he add he wants to stop them fornicating with our women and eating our swans?

A magistrate complains about "bloody foreigners". Just when the Gurkhas have won a long battle against nothing else but racism, you have a Tory frontbencher suggesting that being called a "black bastard" is part and parcel of army life for ethnic minority soldiers.

A demographer that I have respected for a long time turns out to be a founding member of Migrationwatch, a campaigning group against immigration.

A South Yorkshire policeman allegedly assaults a woman. My first thought was they would never behave that way towards a woman - and then it turns out she was a black woman.

These were the institutions that promised us that they would begin to make a different kind of country for us by eradicating racism.

But racism is now becoming legitimate. I look at this landscape, my country, and what do I find. The filth of racism has washed back, but now there's no concern, there's no shame, there's no real opposition.

You can't complain, because the white world in Britain has decided what is racist and it has decided that there is not very much racism in this country.

I blame New Labour. They have shown absolutely no leadership on this since 9/11. Good people should be encouraged to stand up. I want Peter Hain, an old anti-apartheid warrior, to stand up and slap down John Reid.

There's no outrage any more and I am absolutely outraged about that.

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