The Jim Crow system included something called the grandfather clause, which enabled people who would have failed the Poll Tax and literacy test requirements to inherit the franchise from antebellum ancestors. In practice, the beneficiaries were poor whites.
Today, the Labour Party stands poised to adopt its own grandfather clause, restricting the right merely to contest its Leadership to white grandfathers. Only an older white man of proven heterosexuality could ever hope to be nominated by one in five, never mind one in four, Labour MPs.
Moreover, he would also have to be impeccably upper-middle-class, making Keir Starmer's grandfather clause worse than the one that, in 1915, was ruled unconstitutional as an exemption to literacy tests, a ruling that disenfranchised tens of thousands of poor whites, much as our own 1832 Reform Act had disenfranchised women.
All this to stop a white grandmother, Angela Rayner, who is wrong about a very great deal, but who last night did nothing more than speak as she was routinely spoken about. The Left, even the Left as Soft as hers, is never, ever, ever allowed to answer back.
Passed because the Unison delegation voted for it against their own union policy.
ReplyDeleteRayner's union. This Conference is utterly bizarre.
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