WHILST on the streets asking people to sign our "Stop the War" petitions, I am at one and the same time heartened by the number of people eager to sign-up, and appalled by the number of offensive and racist remarks made.

Most of these remarks are directed against asylum-seekers, remarks which I then find repeated in the Letters pages of the Bury Times. They range from the smug, self-satisfied to the openly abusive. How disturbing this is.

Racism and anti-semitism are, alas, as much a part of our culture as apple pie and custard, and are now, 60 years after the Second World War, expressed with absolute impunity on the street, in the workplace, on the football terraces, the hospital ward and, worst of all, the children's playground. Those of us who thought that war had defeated the violence of the Fascists were proved wrong.

Most of us want to live in our own countries and get on with our lives but, tragically, more and more people can't do that anymore. Today we bear witness to tens of thousands of people worldwide fleeing violence and death and, yes, many are coming our way. But they are not welcome, any more than the Jews fleeing Nazi persecution were welcomed years ago.

Like the propaganda directed against the Jews, so today's carefully orchestrated propaganda against a desperate people is fanned by the tabloids, the far right and the cheap and nasty populism of New Labour, designed to appeased the racists.

In the meantime, we're told there is no money available to pay the firefighters, the teachers and the nurses a decent wage, but there's plenty about to blow the people of Iraq into the next world.

For those letter writers who look to right wing fundamentalists and psychopaths to make this country great again, and to send us all back from where we came, I am prepared to stop the world and to let them get off.

GEORGE ABENDSTERN,

one-time German Jewish refugee.