ABSTRACT
Collaboration has become a dirty word, provoking images of cowardice and moral culpability during the Second World War for historians. Anti-Germanism is one of the most unrecognized and virulent forms of racism in contemporary Britain, scarring the lives of people of both recent and distant German origin. Since the summer of 2001, British Home Office immigration officers in Prague have been screening all passengers to Britain in order to stop Czechs of Roma origin reaching the country and claiming asylum. They can do so in spite of the clauses of the Race Relations Act of 2000, outlawing institutional racism, because state discrimination in immigration control procedures was remarkably, and uniquely, exempted from the new legislation. The evidence of the persecution of the Roma in the Czech Republic and elsewhere on the continent is overwhelming and frightening. Ultimately one's Roma therapy heals none of society's wounds. Underneath its pretence of fragrant reasonableness is the stench of racism.
