The Tories must confront their Militant tendency

The Conservative party has faced a choice ever since people began to resent non-white immigration into Britain: to appease or confront racism.

There is a respectable-sounding argument for appeasement: it is possible that Margaret Thatcher's use of the word "swamped" before the 1979 election helped to choke off the electoral rise of the National Front. Certainly, the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen's party in France over roughly the same period requires us to try to understand the reasons for our nation's different course. But it would be perverse to conclude that Mrs Thatcher's pandering to racists was the main or even an important factor in marginalising explicit racism in British politics.

In any case, there ought to be no quarter given to that argument now. John Major's personal anti-racism did the Tories no harm, while William Hague's anti-refugee poses did them no good. Confronting racism is not only the right thing to do, but it is in the interests of any party which hopes to widen its electoral appeal.

Iain Duncan Smith has so far said and done some of the right things. He appointed as shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, who agrees with Labour that immigration can benefit this country. He required three MPs to resign from the Monday Club and he sacked Ann Winterton from his front-bench team when she told a racist so-called joke at a rugby club dinner.

But he has done nothing about Andrew Hunter, the Tory MP who is patron of the grubby magazine Right Now!, which blames "mass immigration" for many national ills. Now the Monday Club, which has advocated voluntary repatriation of ethnic minorities, is reasserting its links with the Tory party, pointing out that almost all its 3,000 members are also members of their local Tory associations. If Mr Duncan Smith is serious about, for example, persuading Asian business people or most young people of his anti-racist sincerity, he should require Mr Hunter to sever his links with Right Now! And he should say that membership of the loathsome Monday Club is incompatible with that of the Tory party.

The Monday Club is Mr Duncan Smith's Militant tendency. Not in the sense that it is a secret body of infiltrators seeking to take control, but in that it is – as Militant was for Labour – a test of the party's determination to win over the centre ground.