Beware Zanzibar
From Professor Yorick Wilks Sir: Your editorial 'Labour's lovely loony' (21 October) underestimates the true social engineer when you write, 'The law has no jurisdiction in deciding whom we may or may not marry.' Beyond the obvious anti- incest and anti-polygamy laws, which seem to have general assent, at least for the moment, one should not be too sanguine. After all, and as you point out, the anti-dis- crimination laws we now have impinge on our lives in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
Although Britain has a far greater rate of interracial marriage than, say, the USA, it is an obvious fact that the overwhelming majority of people of all races still prefer to marry someone of the same race. It is so obvious as to be rarely remarked on as the most striking and widespread example of endemic racism, for what else could it be? Interestingly, it is a form of racism of which all races in the UK are guilty, though not quite to the same extent.
The law has no jurisdiction now, but it is a very flexible instrument in the right hands, and Lady Gavron's remark about Prince Charles is, to my knowledge, the first public acknowledgment of racism's strongest manifestation in this country, one no more or less defensible than many of the forms the law now stigmatises.
If anyone thinks nothing can be done about this, one should recall Zanzibar in the 1960s, where women of the long-estab- lished Persian community were forcibly married to members of the majority popu- lation by government order. As always with racism, its eradication is only a matter of how far you are prepared to go.
Professor Yorick Wilks
Sheffield
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