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Thanks Victor. You certainly have had a fascinating and inspiring life story.

I agree entirely with your sentiments about race. When I first got involved in politics (I was an MP for at state and federal levels for 22 years) the general aspiration, certainly on the left, was to transcend race and judge people (in the words of Martin Luther King) on the ‘content of their character, not the colour of their skin’.

Nowadays with the embrace of identity politics a significant part of the left/progressive side (with which I was always affiliated) seems to have become obsessed about race, and seemingly intent on perpetuating racial distinctions and grievances. I think this is incredibly retrograde and counter-productive to the prospects of racial harmony.

All the abusive talk about 'white people' and 'whiteness' that I describe in the article is highly dangerous (as well as being strangely ethno-masochistic as most of those saying these things are themselves white). If you were setting out to revive a white-supremacist movement, that would be the way to do it.

On the matter of multiculturalism, I think a distinction can be made between a soft, relatively benign version that recognizes the reality that we live in a multi-ethnic society and that there needs to be a degree of respect and toleration between different cultural groups, and a hard variant that is prepared to accommodate the emergence of parallel societies with profoundly different norms and practices, as we are seeing in Europe. In Britain, for example, there are now 85 sharia law tribunals adjudicating on all manner of issues.

I hope you are enjoying the forum’s activities and I look forward to your continuing involvement.