They are targeting Undercliffe - playing on fears among young people around the issue of schooling, etc. New Labour has been making racist attacks on asylum-seekers and refugees publicly for more than two years, so there is a lot of hypocrisy in what Cook said. Personally I would not view the state s anti-immigration controls as necessarily racist. In the 1950s immigrants were persuaded to come to Britain from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent, and today east Europeans are one of the main groups kept out. Immigration controls are definitely racist.
Racism is used to try to keep down wages.
The key element is wage labour being transferred across the globe. When people from Pakistan and India came here it was their labour-power that was in demand. After the meltdown in eastern Europe people want to move where they believe they can enjoy prosperity. The government wants to keep them out. Fundamentally the question is racism.