A key issue when looking at a complex social, economic and cultural phenomenon that is immigration is the impression people have of it in their minds. Luckily, I believe we live in a society in Britain today where multiculturalism is accepted and even encouraged and celebrated. However, immigration has always had its critics, some target the economic effect it has, some target the societal effect. But there are few who oppose it on a racial and/or religious level, their prejudices and hatred being their motivation and they wish to stop immigration altogether or even reverse it, deporting legal asylum seekers and British-born people of certain ancestral ethnicities.
The issue of prejudice is older than immigration, it can trace its roots down to instinctual behavior, a tendency to look for someone to blame or establish ‘us verses them’ dichotomies in society.
Laws are made to protect people against the prejudices of the minority but protection can only reach a certain point before it contravenes people’s freedoms. The people with prejudices in an environment with freedom of speech walk a thin line between expressing their true views and remaining within the law. They criticize the handling of immigration on an economic level, often incoherently and illogically, when they would prefer to be discuss it on a racial level, where their true feelings lie.
The example below I believe is a prime example of trying to work within the law to peddle racist and intolerant ideas. Although it is not apparent immediately, the issue of immigration is cunningly hidden in the subtext:
The images above are taken from excalibur.bnp.org.uk; they are T-shirt designs celebrating a number of ‘British heroes’ that have played roles in British history during their lives. Taken individually, most of the designs seem innocent and genuinely celebratory, however, when viewed as a whole, the collection has a clear political message and motive.
Amongst the group of ‘Heroes’ is Enoch Powell, Conservative MP in the 1950’s and 60’s, famous for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, which predicted the doom of the so-called ‘indigenous’ whites as the dominant ethnicity in Britain and likened the rise of a multi-cultural society to that of an act of genocide upon ethnic whites and their culture and history.
A politician with highly controversial views seems like an odd choice to be placed among Richard the Lionheart and Isaac Newton in a list of great British heroes. However, it makes much more sense when you know that the whole set of designs were commissioned by the British National Party.
As this is a discussion of professionalism, not politics, I shall try and avoid the discussion of the controversial policies of the BNP and shall only examine them for the purpose of contextualizing this set of designs. The BNP often celebrate British history and use it to justify their attacks on multiculturalism by claiming racism on the part of the ethnic minorities diluting ‘traditional’ British culture with their presence in this country. The BNP challenge generally accepted views on historical periods, claiming that multiculturalism is trying to make the British people ashamed of their heritage. They make specific reference to the crusades and the British Empire, downplaying the established view of the tyranny imposed by the British people in those periods and highlighting the otherwise ignored good points of historical British foreign policy. In doing this, they want to generate a sense of Nationalism within the people of Britain in order to carry out their other policies.
In a very real sense, these T-shirt designed can be viewed as BNP propaganda. They are materials used to shape the way people think in order to bring weight to their words.
The designer who created them is either very brave, or very unprofessional. In creating the designs, he is drawing a link between them that carry a deliberate, calculated political message. In particular, a highly controversial and message that is associated with a party with a number of other controversial, even dubious policies. The impact of creating and distributing such designs is or at least should extremely large. By aligning themselves with such an extreme political minority, they risk becoming seriously alienated in the design community.
The designer must either then be very committed to the cause, willing to sacrifice work from many clients not wanting to be associated with people of such a political alignment.
On the other hand, the designer is either ignorant of the impact of his work or simply does not care about it, such behavior prescriptive of unprofessional design practice. Professionalism can be defined with a holding a set of ethics on which informs the practice of the practitioner. In the first instance, even though the designer is taking a risky career choice, they are doing it because of what they believe and because it supports their political alignment. This can be admired and seen as professional behavior, despite the nature of the beliefs they hold.
