I HAVE already responded in an earlier letter (HAS, April 25) to Adam Walker’s irrelevant semantic arguments about the meaning of racism (HAS, July 1).

As Chris White, of Spennymoor, pointed out in a comment on The Northern Echo website at the time, the widely accepted definition of racism as “prejudice or discrimination based on race” does not necessarily require a belief in the superiority of one’s own race.

What I find repugnant is the BNP’s proposal to decide who can or cannot live in Great Britain on the basis of race or skin colour. The question of whether or not this is based on a belief in the superiority of the white race amounts to the difference between “Get out of our country, it is reserved for the superior Aryan race” and “No offence, mate, but you’re not welcome here – your skin’s the wrong colour.”

To those on the receiving end, it makes little difference. It also makes no difference whether Mr Walker wants to call this “racism,” “racial discrimination”

or, to use the BNP term, “racial separatism”. It is a poisonous ideology whichever way you look at it.

Pete Winstanley, Durham.