Reading your article in last Tuesday's Guardian, leads me to conclude that you would probably be in favour of us airlifting as many HIV-infected Africans to Britain as possible in order to give them the kind of treatment and life-expectancy denied to them in their own countries, or have I misunderstood you? (Racism is what makes us really sick, 5 August 2003).

Surely we face a dilemma:  If I had  an African friend with AIDS I'm sure that I would want to help them get into Britain for the vital treatment not available to them in Africa. But if my African friend deserves to be brought to Britain for treatment, why not the other 20 million Africans with AIDS?

I think that liberal, multiracial and multicultural enthusiasts, like yourself, and those of us who are less enthusiastic about immigration and "otherness"* misunderstand each other because we look at the same situation from entirely different perspectives: you see, and perhaps know, the individual African with AIDS who desperately needs to get to Britain for treatment, while I see the 20 million other Africans with AIDS who are just as desperate to get here.

* I am horrified at the thought of Britain one day having a black or Asian prime minister (even as an alternative to someone like Ian Duncan Smith), just as I am sure every African and Asian would be of having a white prime minister in any of their countries. You do not have to be a fascist or a racist to feel and believe that race matters. By denying and suppressing the fact that it does (perhaps not to you, but to the vast majority of people) you are helping to create the kind of explosive situation that you believe (I'm sure sincerely) you are dedicated to fighting against.

Race matters! Because it is about who your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on, are. It matters because most of us identify with and are most interested in our own race, just as we are in our own family (what is race, but our super-extended family?). 

It is time we stopped denying the importance of race because of our (understandable) fears of the criminal insanities the Nazis attached to it.

Most indigenous people do not want to live in multiracial, multicultural society; they tolerate it because they have to and because they are decent people who wish the immigrants who are here (some of whom they know or are friends with) no harm or offence , but if the likes of you persist in forcing even more than the millions who are already here on us, one day (when the indigenous European population realises it is becoming a minority in the land of its own forefathers, as in parts of the country it already is) Enoch Powell 's prediction of "rivers of blood" may well come true. And the likes of YOU, my friend, for all your good and noble intentions, will carry much of the blame!

Finally, "xenophobia", I would also like to point out, is just one side of a coin, on the other side of which is "love of the familiar".