Sounds like an appalling late night Channel 4 comedy double act, doesn’t it? No, I was looking for news of two demos I’d been thinking of attending on the day that history will remember for Musharraf’s new coup (buried in revision, I ended up missing both), and this was on the front page of Google News (which, I should point out, always thinks I’m in France because that’s where my laptop was bought).

It seems that Chadian and other African expats in England were preparing to march on the French embassy in London, to express their outrage at the kidnapping of 103 infants by the French humanitarian agency L’Arche de Zoe, or rather, by a few of its staff who seem to consider the word “African” to be synonymous with “orphan”. The day before the march, they got a phone call from the authorities telling them to keep away from the embassy.

I’ve not found this reported anywhere except that obscure French Christian Journal – maybe it didn’t happen, maybe very few editors considered it particularly interesting, if anyone does find it elsewhere let me know – but it would be a remarkable and worrying turn in Anglo-French relations if one state is now cancelling protests in the other.

The organiser of the Chadian march expressed his faith in Britain’s traditions of civil liberties, and we could also point to the French tradition of actually using their civil liberties. However, both Britain and France are currently governed by people with very little taste for either, especially when it comes to people with a darker (or generally more foreign) shade of skin.

Can I assume that by now we’re all aware of Blair’s laws against speaking out of turn, that we heard Brown’s highly suspect “British Jobs For British Workers”, that the eternal debate about whether we should lock up suspicious-looking Muslims without trial for three months or just one is drowned out only by the bullets in the back of Jean-Charles de Menezes head? Then let’s move on to Sarkozy…

… who’s even worse. As an immigrant with mainly immigrant friends, I remember spending my time in France conversing in hushed tones about what the petit fascho was going to do to us. He has come up with some ridiculous laws (DNA tests, anyone?), but the sheer number of people he kicks out of the country is simply staggering. In the run up to his presidential campaign he was keen to avoid looking weak, and actually intensified his programme of rounding up foreigners and second-generation racaille, provoking reactions like this and this.

In fact, as President and during his long spell as Interior Minister, Sarkozy mastered the reality and language of the War State just as well as Bush and Blair; far better, in fact, as Sarkozy’s war is not happening far away (although his foreign minister is desperate to be invited to the party in Iran) but in banlieux right across France. The riots of 2005 were well reported in the international press, but the context was not. Who knew that the deaths of two teenagers running from the police were not isolated incidents at all, but the inevitable corollary of systematic, racist police brutality?

Well, Sarkozy knew. He’d been waiting for a long time for a chance to suggest “washing away the scum with a powerhose”. He didn’t invent the banlieux, the zones of exclusion, unemployment and resentment that orbit every French town worth its salt, nor did he have the idea of exploiting people’s fear of them to gain political power; when Sarkozy won the 2007 elections the leader of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, lamented that his “colours” had been stolen. But Sarkozy’s genius lay in declaring war on them. His election was all but khaki – or rather, all but blackshirt.

Now where might he have got that idea? We might look across the Channel to our own Tony Blair, who nauseatingly congratulated Sarko on his election, du fond de son coeur; Sarkozy is returning the favour by lobbying for Blair’s nomination as President of Europe. We can also look right accross the Atlantic. Sarko rarely misses a chance to praise the U. S. of A., and it has presumably been his inspiration in waging a war on the welfare state wrapped up with the Islamophobia associated with The War Against Terror. It would certainly explain how he turned out so very wrong; from France, Americans look like this…

(ok, it’s horrible franglais, but I bet you still love it)

But then, that doesn’t work. As discussed above, America’s (by which I mean, of course, the Coalition’s) wars are far off affairs and, besides, they’ve been a catastrophe for all concerned. No, we get a much better clue when we look at the comparisions between French banlieux and South African apartheid. The comparisons are apt in many ways, but they hit a wall when we realise that the most significant form of discrimination towards the inhabitants of Clichy-des-Bois and Neuilly-sur-Seine is the one that excludes them almost totally from the jobs market; South African apartheid, by contrast, was a brutal method of keeping the “racially inferior” workers in their place.

That remind you of anything? There’s another place that’s regularly compared with apartheid South Africa – indeed, Desmond Tutu considers it to be worse – and it’s a place close to Sarkozy’s heart. In occupied Palestine too, vast sections of the population are slowly, painfully excluded from their own country. That the fate of the Palestinians is so much worse than that of the banlieusards might be because the former are begrudged their very existence – but the existence of the latter is exceedingly useful. In either case, the vilification and victimisation of unwanted outsiders is making the “white” mainstream easier to control too. That’s how fascism works.