Is it even possible to have a poster about immigration?

Selling a hard-line policy on the subject of immigration and deportation is always going to be tough. Sometimes the policy will sound eminently sensible and most people won't have a problem with it. Take for example the policy of deporting foreign criminals. It's a UK Government policy (although they've failed dismally at it) and no one really seems too concerned by it. After all, if you get invited into someone's house and then try to steal their belongings you would expect to be kicked out, and quite right too.

However, if you invited in to your home a family and one of the kids tried to nick something would you kick the family out? Probably not I'd say, although I imagine in England at least, the family would leave anyway due to the whole social embarrassment aspect of our culture. The analogy is, I admit, crude, but whether you kick the entire family out is what is being asked by one of the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) right now, and it's caused a storm of criticism from the UN and the UK papers like the Independent on the basis of racism.

Now, I don't personally buy the line that the policy itself is inherently racist. After all, it would apply to immigrants as whole, which would include me. I'm not of a different race to your average Swiss, merely a different nationality. What's more the policy itself does seem to be addressing a practical problem as well, albeit perhaps badly. If you have a policy that says any immigrants that commit crime must be deported, then what do you do when the criminals start to be kids?

You can't deport them on their own after all, that would spark international outrage and criticism. If you don't deport them it will spark outrage and criticism at home, especially if they've done something really bad (and as we know from recent week, kids can do that sometimes). This leaves you with the option of just deporting the whole family instead, thus nullifying both earlier problems whilst inevitably creating another that looks awfully like the first.

However, it's not just the policy itself that appears to be the problem for many. For sure, "blood guilt" is quite way out there so to speak, but it's the way it's being sold, and the people selling it, where the "racism" problem comes in. You see, they have, as one says, "got form" and their poster campaign can be easily interpreted in a negative racial sense.

The poster shows a group of cartoon white sheep standing on a Swiss flag kicking a black sheep off it with the words "For More Security" underneath it. In the past the Swiss People's Party has used an image of black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. "What more evidence do you need? Is thus the easy answer.

Now, it may in fact be true, that underneath the gloss of the Swiss People's Party is a secret white power clan of fruitcakes and nut jobs. They might be secret fascists, or they may be white power socialists like the BNP all dreaming of a white utopia of collectivised co-operatives and the end of corporate capitalism. However, what struck me was this question of how exactly you sell any immigration policy - especially if it's a plank of your platform - without being called a racist?

Just think of the sheep issue, what other animal could they have possibly used? Whatever they chose there would inevitably be an interpretation of the animal being kicked out as some sort of representation of a particular race or creed. Is it just the colour that is important perhaps in the case of the sheep? If they had used a blue and red sheep would that have made it OK? Or would that have made it seems almost comical and draw aware from any notion of a serious political party?

Perhaps they could have wrapped the sheep in flags? But then, what flag for the kicked out immigrant? You're going to cause a diplomatic storm with whatever one you use right? In fact, how exactly do you represent an immigrant in a poster about immigration policy without being accused of racism? Perhaps you would need to have identical collectives of people of a mixture of races each wearing t-shirts. One group says "immigrants" and the other says "non-immigrants". That would make it non-racist surely?

The problem of course is that at that point you'll be accused of xenophobia instead. And charges of xenophobia will inevitably lead to a conflation with racism anyway, so you are in fact back to square one. It seems to me that you just can't do it. There is no form of imagery that can talk about immigration without the subject drawing down ever quickly to the lowest common denominator of "racism".

And of course, this actually suits those that make such arguments. After all, calling someone "racist" is a bit like calling them a paedophile. Anything that seems to imply a "prejudice" can easily be turned in racism and then you win the argument by simply closing it down - it's the same Godwin's Law only in the real world.

A little green man once said that "fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." This seems to be the path of logic that the Left uses when it closes down these arguments. For them the fear of immigrant crime leads to anger. The anger of immigrant crime leads to hate of immigrants. And the hate of immigrants leads to their suffering.

Yet equally, if we apply the logic in reverse, does not the fear of honest discourse lead to anger on their part? Does not their anger lead to hatred of free thought? And does not that hatred of free thought lead to the inevitable suffering by creating an intellectually oppressed and unthinking nation?

The policy of Swiss People's Party is undoubtedly bizarre, but the reaction to its poster seems to me to be one that would be inevitable no matter what they had done. As I say, it may well be that the party has distasteful and ignorant ideas about race.

However, there is a wider concern surely about the way in which there can no longer be a discussion of certain subjects for fear of instant condemnation and exclusion from discourse by the dominant intellectual theme of Western European thinking? This is not a defence of their policy; it is a criticism of the way in which the subject they are talking about no longer takes place in a free arena.