"Are you thinking what we're thinking..."

As Tony Blair said to Michael Howard, he isn't a racist, he's an opportunist (and Tony should know all about that). What's happening is an attempt to appeal to the racism which is being directly stoked up by the nastier papers.

Why else would a keen young would-be MP feel it necessary to doctor a photograph of himself taking part in a demonstration in support of a family of refugees facing deportation, so as to suggest he was demonstrating against immigration? He didn't want to be off-message, and the message is "nudge-nudge, send 'em back". (As articulated by rather too explicitly on-message Tory MP Bob Spink on the other end of Essex from where I live, who put an advert in his local paper saying "What bit of 'send them back' don't you understand Mr Blair?")

Yes, there are some decent Tories around, and Cllr is one of them I rather think - but they are being shafted, the same way decent Socialists have been shafted by the man Howard wants to replace.

Except that the kind of attitudes Howard is flirting with are even nastier than anything Blair got into bed with.

No, racism isn't exclusively or even particularly right-wing - it's a Weapon of Moral Destrucution that can be, and has been, invoked by unscrupulous politicians right across the left-right spectrum. Right now, the people doing it are the Tory Party on the right and the BNP a bit further towards the left.