The woke left will keep the Tories in power for another decade

By Pete North - April 3, 2021

The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, prompted by last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, has been met with vocal disapproval by the usual cast of race grifters, leftists and axe grinders pushing the idea that the UK is systemically racist.

This stuff is political fairy dust for the right. It doesn’t particularly matter how rigorous the report was, the left will immediately slam it and go overboard on insisting that Britain’s problems are caused by racism – and that such racism is rooted in our colonial past.

When this is the current state of the left the Tories can afford to be complacent. The worse the left gets the safer the Tories are no matter how badly they’re performing.

There are, of course, race related problems in British society, for which there are explanations but they are multifaceted and complex, stemming from faith and culture, and class. There are also regional variances influenced by all manner of secondary factors.

At one time we could have pointed to institutional racism within certain branches of the state, but even then it was passive and casual rather than active discrimination.

The idea that any branch of the state actively and deliberately discriminates based on race is risible. The closest manifestation cited is the Windrush affair, but everything about that points to the dead hand of bureaucracy as a dysfunctional Home Office attempts to meet its quotas to bring down immigration.

But then the left knows this which is why you have to look at how they shifted the goalposts. Systemic racism now means more vague manifestations of inequality such as disparities in access to healthcare, education and housing.

I don’t think the government is denying the existence of such inequality, it’s just that racism is a wholly inadequate or at the very least incomplete explanation. There is certainly further debate to be had about policing, but even then, broad brush assertions of institutional racism don’t really hold. Police will now hesitate to act if there is even the suggestion of racism. They’re completely hamstrung by it.

If the government were to roll over and accept the diagnosis of systemic racism, as per the Blair administration, we would no doubt see more of the same public sector diversity bureaucracy, and funding of special interest groups and self-appointed “community” spokesmen. The likelihood of it solving anything is around nil.

Ultimately the charge of systemic racism is a Trojan horse for US style identity politics, which is wholly corrosive and counter productive. The people pushing the notion of institutional racism are not remotely interested in building a fairer society. It’s just about stoking political divisions they can exploit and profit from.

The solutions they propose are always the same recycled socialist ideas that have never worked. Dividing people by race with a view to weighted redistribution and affirmative action will only lead to structural divisions, intra-racial victim status rivalry and learned helplessness – thereby paying poor ethnic minority communities to stay poor, perpetuating and exacerbating existing problems. One might even say that holding them to lower standards and assigning victim status on the basis of race is profoundly racist.

It actually speaks to the corruption of the left that they would attack this report which says in its opening remarks, “another revelation from our dive into the data was just how stuck some groups from the white majority are. As a result, we came to the view that recommendations should, wherever possible, be designed to remove obstacles for everyone, rather than specific groups.”

That used to be the mainstream left wing view – that class divides us more than race and the mission should be to unite the working classes in that fight. Instead they have descended to the tawdry and racist woke ideology embodying the original sin of “whiteness” giving rise to the decolonisation agenda.

This is not about racism. This isn’t about black lives. This is old fashioned communist deconstructionism – seeking to undermine and demoralise the nation at every turn.

For as long as Labour is captive to the woke left, we simply cannot view it as a loyal opposition. Wokeism is a foreign idea set about the destruction of western liberal democracies. Unless Labour is bold enough to castigate corrosive identity politics and wokeism, all the Tories need to do is rattle a few cages with a report like this, whereupon leftist activists reveal their true attitudes.

Thus far, as noted by Rakib Ehsan, Dr Tony Sewell has been called a “token black man”, “Uncle Tom”, “race traitor” and “coon” – The Commissioners have been labelled as a team of “coconuts”, and Joseph Goebbels and the Ku Klux Klan have been used as points of reference. It shares much in common with the supposedly trans-inclusive types who spend much of their time on Twitter threatening “TERFs” with rape and violence.

There are any number of serious vulnerabilities the Tories have created for themselves, be it the abject failure of test and trace, its disastrously incoherent lockdown policies, its flirtation with collapsing the Northern Ireland Protocol and the trade deal with the EU that may actually be worse than no deal at all. But for as long as the left is completely obsessed with race and identity, they hand the Tories all the culture war fodder they need to evade scrutiny.

This race report has been a useful exercise for the Tories. All of its main critics are the usual stock of self-promoting narcissistic leftist wastrels and woke grifters, and they’re all chuntering from sedentary positions of privilege. They represent no one. Nobody wants or needs them, and if it weren’t for university funding they’d be cleaning toilets. The Tories don’t need activists when they have these people doing their work for them.

Growing up in Bradford in the eighties, I’ve seen what real racism looks like. I remember well the racist graffiti sprayed on the Pakistani shopkeeper’s car on more than one occasion – just a few yards from our home. No doubt that kind of thing still happens, but it’s not that common any more. You don’t hear openly racist terms like “paki” all that often, except in the familiar, and even then, though the left gets worked up about words, most people will speak out against racist acts.

Britain is not a racist country – but the public could very easily lose patience with celebrities, academics and public intellectuals constantly asserting that we are. As much as it’s tedious, it’s grossly insulting, and if they keep it up, they’ll keep the Tories in power for another decade.