Thursday 18 June 2020

You Win Or You Die

Dominic Raab is the First Secretary of State. He deputises for the Prime Minister whenever anyone needs to do so. Should Boris Johnson walk under a bus, then Raab would become Prime Minister, right there on the spot. And Game of Thrones is more real to Raab than anything to do with black people is.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is now led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions who has tried to steal Marcus Rashford's dinner money. Unlike the Conservative Party, Labour subscribes to the IHRA Definition, which is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. On the basis of that Definition, Labour has expelled Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Tony Greenstein, who were members in good standing even under Tony Blair.

Labour no longer supports the Chagossian cause either in itself or in the person of Julian Assange. Labour no longer supports self-determination for Kashmir. It has replaced Diane Abbott with an all-white Home Office team that has been outflanked from the left by Priti Patel. It has promoted Jess Phillips. It refuses to participate in the new commission on inequality.

Labour has a particular problem with black men. Only six black men have ever been Labour MPs. There are only three at the moment, with only two black men currently sitting as Labour Peers. There are fewer than 100 black men as Labour Councillors, and no black man in this century has sat either as a Labour Member of the London Assembly or as a member of the party's National Executive Committee.

Working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct. Boys are also ill-served. 13 years of Labour Government did nothing to improve any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The people who make these mistakes are the backbone of the Labour Party's membership, and their children are the direct beneficiaries of the present system. Keir Starmer is those members' choice as a potential Prime Minister.

The Labour Party's staff has been shown to be rampantly racist; one of those who have been so exposed has been calling me a "mulatto" since 2003, when he was on the staff of the then Government Chief Whip. And Labour has failed to oppose an early relaxation of the lockdown despite the far greater risk of Covid-19 to BAME people.

There is a world elsewhere. And it is a world with plenty going on in it.

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