Last year's General Election showed that BAME voters had become Labour's loyalest electoral bloc. But then the party replaced a Leader who had had deep, deep, deep roots in the anti-racist movement, installing instead a former Director of Public Prosecutions.
He turned out to have been funded by Trevor Chinn. And now he is suspending those who had courageously leaked the Labour report, rather than those who had been named in it. Lo and behold, while Keir Starmer's Labour Party is predictably behind the Conservatives everywhere outside London, even in London it is ahead by only six points, where under Jeremy Corbyn its lead had been 16. And there is still more than a year to go until Super Thursday, never mind a General Election in 2024.
The Government has appointed a commission of inquiry into the disproportionate number of BAME people among the victims of Covid-19. It is to be chaired by Trevor Phillips, a cruel overlooking of Rod Liddle, who might have identified economic inequality as the root of the problem. But a desperate Labour Party is to have its own, chaired by Doreen Lawrence, the party's new Race Relations Adviser.
It is no disrespect to Baroness Lawrence to say that her 67-year-old Jamaican accent is not, in 2020, the voice of BAME Britain, or even of BAME London. Starmer may indeed enjoy the support of the old Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment within the right-wing Labour machine in London, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and the former Metropolitan County of the West Midlands, plus pockets in other urban areas.
But there is now someone in Britain from every inhabited territory on the planet. There are no all-white towns, and there are ever-fewer all-white villages. The BAME population is young, and increasingly mixed-race. Its members were typically born here, as were their parents. Stephen Lawrence would have turned 46 this year. The only lasting legacy of his case has been the abolition of the protection against double jeopardy, a protection that is fundamental to the presumption of innocence.
Go round Eltham now and and tell the black boys who could have been Stephen Lawrence's sons about how his case "stopped the Met from being racist". Go on. I dare you. And go over the people who had been convicted of offences of which they had previously been acquitted. I would bet you anything you liked that they were disproportionately of a duskier hue. As well as being almost invariably working-class.
Baroness Lawrence will not be investigating that, or even advising on it. Nor on Starmer's record as DPP. Nor on Trevor Chinn. Nor on the Labour report, which among other things revealed that the then Regional Director of the London Labour Party had called Diane Abbott an Angry Black Woman. Nor on the IHRA Definition's silencing of BAME, migrant and refugee experiences in a manner redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. Nor even on the roots in economic inequality of the disproportionate number of BAME people among the victims of Covid-19. Her report will not be whitewash. It will be blackwash.
He turned out to have been funded by Trevor Chinn. And now he is suspending those who had courageously leaked the Labour report, rather than those who had been named in it. Lo and behold, while Keir Starmer's Labour Party is predictably behind the Conservatives everywhere outside London, even in London it is ahead by only six points, where under Jeremy Corbyn its lead had been 16. And there is still more than a year to go until Super Thursday, never mind a General Election in 2024.
The Government has appointed a commission of inquiry into the disproportionate number of BAME people among the victims of Covid-19. It is to be chaired by Trevor Phillips, a cruel overlooking of Rod Liddle, who might have identified economic inequality as the root of the problem. But a desperate Labour Party is to have its own, chaired by Doreen Lawrence, the party's new Race Relations Adviser.
It is no disrespect to Baroness Lawrence to say that her 67-year-old Jamaican accent is not, in 2020, the voice of BAME Britain, or even of BAME London. Starmer may indeed enjoy the support of the old Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment within the right-wing Labour machine in London, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and the former Metropolitan County of the West Midlands, plus pockets in other urban areas.
But there is now someone in Britain from every inhabited territory on the planet. There are no all-white towns, and there are ever-fewer all-white villages. The BAME population is young, and increasingly mixed-race. Its members were typically born here, as were their parents. Stephen Lawrence would have turned 46 this year. The only lasting legacy of his case has been the abolition of the protection against double jeopardy, a protection that is fundamental to the presumption of innocence.
Go round Eltham now and and tell the black boys who could have been Stephen Lawrence's sons about how his case "stopped the Met from being racist". Go on. I dare you. And go over the people who had been convicted of offences of which they had previously been acquitted. I would bet you anything you liked that they were disproportionately of a duskier hue. As well as being almost invariably working-class.
Baroness Lawrence will not be investigating that, or even advising on it. Nor on Starmer's record as DPP. Nor on Trevor Chinn. Nor on the Labour report, which among other things revealed that the then Regional Director of the London Labour Party had called Diane Abbott an Angry Black Woman. Nor on the IHRA Definition's silencing of BAME, migrant and refugee experiences in a manner redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. Nor even on the roots in economic inequality of the disproportionate number of BAME people among the victims of Covid-19. Her report will not be whitewash. It will be blackwash.
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