The last few weeks have seen anti-racist outrage sparked on both sides of the Channel. On the 9th January leftie French national Libération published a poll stating that 30% of French voters would not rule out voting for Marine Le Pen in the country's upcoming presidential election. Daughter of the infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen and charismatic new leader of the ever-racist Front National, she has succeeded in bringing xenophobia to the mainstream, and occupies almost as many column inches as the election's two main contenders. A few days earlier in the UK, a wide range of public figures jumped up and down over a badly-phrased and somewhat simplistic tweet from MP Diane Abbott. The definition of "racism" seems relative even within the cultural confines of Western Europe.

France is a country where “You’re scared of Chinese people”, featured in Glamour magazine’s recent article “15 things you’d never confess to” without anyone batting an eyelid (Jan 2012). They would not have printed that here: politically-correct modern Britain is facing a rather different set of social challenges.

France is dealing with a traditional sort of racism, a disenchanted population suffering in the midst of increasing economic uncertainty and seeking to shift the blame elsewhere. However, whilst Britain's BNP has nationalist policies akin to those of the Front National, their support base is currently much smaller. Our primary concern here in the UK is more modern and complex: a society asking questions about whether minority and majority groups are differently entitled to voice their views on racial issues, and whether the former should be given preferential treatment in specific environments (namely the workplace and higher education) in order to achieve greater social equality. Readers of tabloids and broadsheets alike are hit with annual floods of analysis about ethnic minority presence in everything from the police force to the new Oxbridge intake.

If anything positive can be taken from Diane Abbott's recent experience, it is that after the initial reaction some genuine reflection on these questions hopefully took place. If even half of Caitlin Moran's 172000 or so followers bothered to read and consider the Dorian Lynskey article she tweeted about, or indeed the followers of any other social networking idol stopped to weigh up the views of their deity, then Britain is a step or two closer to working out how we feel about these new racial issues. France's future is bleaker, though not entirely hopeless. Her problems with xenophobia and racism are unlikely to disappear in the near future, but are largely the result of social and economic factors which have had similar effects in other developed countries, and which have eventually been overcome. For now, Europe just has to sit tight, and hope that wavering 30% of French voters do not vote for Marine Le Pen and the outdated racism which her father's party still embodies.