Down Kemi’s rabbit hole, there’s too much equalities legislation. The solution? Get rid. Photograph: Kin Cheung/APView image in fullscreenDown Kemi’s rabbit hole, there’s too much equalities legislation. The solution? Get rid. Photograph: Kin Cheung/APSearch black boys, protect white folk: Kemi vies to out-right the far rightJohn CraceWhen politicians talk ‘common sense’ it’s time to worry; when the Tory leader does, it’s time to be doubly vigilant
You know how it is. You’re a middle class, straight white man in his 60s in A&E. Possibly the most disadvantaged person in the entire country. You complain of chest pains. In the adjoining triage queue there is a black woman with what looks like a broken toe. You know what happens next. The black woman is seen within minutes. You have a cardiac arrest on the waiting room floor.
Said no one ever. There may be times when there simply aren’t enough staff in the A&E department. There may also be times when a doctor under pressure fails to make the right diagnosis. But no one for a minute believes they are being deliberately kept waiting any longer than necessary. The founding principle of the NHS is predicated on patients being treated according to the severity of their condition.
Just not in Kemi world. The Tory leader sees danger in every decision. Not that NHS staff will deliberately try to kill off elderly, white males. Just that they’ve been through so many unconscious bias training sessions that they have transferred their unconscious bias to a different group of people. It’s the quantity theory of bias. There’s a certain amount to go round and if you shift it from one person it merely reattaches itself to another. The only way to eliminate unconscious bias is to decide it no longer exists. Replace it with “common sense”. Job done.
When politicians start talking about “common sense” solutions, it’s usually time to start worrying. When Kemi Badenoch starts doing it, you need to be doubly vigilant. She has form for this kind of thing. One moment sounding almost reasonable, the next contradicting herself while going off on one.
Generally speaking, making policy on the basis of a few cases where mistakes were undeniably made is a recipe for disaster. Yet for Kemi it seems to be the only way of making policy. And her party loves her for it. Though her polls remain dismal, more and more Tory MPs worship at her feet. It remains one of life’s more eternal mysteries.
Kemi was in a small room at the Institute for Government in Westminster for her latest keynote speech. The latest in an ongoing series. This one was to meet equalities legislation head on. Top line? There was way too much of it. She didn’t want to sound complacent … but she couldn’t help sounding complacent.
You couldn’t argue with her assertion that everyone should be treated equally. But you could raise a few eyebrows that we had already done far too much to make life more tolerable for minorities and we had now reached a point where to be a white person was to be a potential victim. Police forces had spent too long thinking of institutional racism that they were now in danger of becoming racist against white people.
As a society, we may have been racist once, but we’ve all moved on. “Britain is the least racist country in the world,” Kemi said. Really? If so, then the bar is quite low. She appears not to have noticed the growing support for Restore and Reform’s increasingly far-right brand of populism. Maybe she’s been too busy making sure her party tracks right with them. Like boiling frogs.
Weirdly, though, Kemi wanted to have things both way. To say that we weren’t racist while implying the police who had attended the scene of Henry Nowak’s murder were guilty of unconscious racist bias against him. Despite the judge having specifically ruled this out in his sentencing notes. There again, Kemi has never come across a situation where she doesn’t know best. And far be it from her to use a young man’s murder for her own political ends – she would never do that because Henry’s father had asked politicians not to do so – but please excuse her for making political capital out of his death.
Read moreOnce again we were disappearing down the rabbit holes of what passes for Kemi’s brain. Because in her mind, it is quite clear what happened last December. The police came to the scene of the crime, saw that Henry was dying and then deliberately chose to attend first to the Digwa brothers. Because they had been trained to prioritise racism over a fatal stabbing. It was all quite mad. No consideration that it was a dark December night and the police might have made a terrible mistake.
There would be more to come. Come the questions from the media, Kemi was asked about the near fatal knife attack in Belfast on Monday night. “I don’t want to rush to judgement,” she said. Before immediately rushing to judgement. She had read reports that he might be a Somali man. The police have arrested a man believed to be from Sudan. But that’s almost the same thing in the modern Reform-lite Tory party. The main point was that the suspect could have been an illegal immigrant who had come over on a boat from France. I mean, let’s face it. We’d all rather be attacked by a Brit rather than an illegal immigrant.
By now, Kemi was on a roll. Getting to her main point. It was time to do away with the public sector equality duty (PESD). She was all done with the touchy-feely stuff that helped make life better for people from disadvantaged minorities. There may have been a place for it once, but enough was enough. As far as she was concerned everyone was equal and people just ought to use use their common sense. It was because we were now all so equal that it was time to get rid of laws that made us unequal.
What was required was more black boys being searched. Not fewer. As long as the police were searching them for a reason, there could be no accusations of racism. And there was no reason to have an association of black police officers. Being a police officer was the same regardless of colour. Imagine if there was an association of white police officers. She’s obviously never heard of the Masons.
Kemi ended with a non-mea culpa. She had tried to get rid of the PESD when she had been in government but unknown forces had tried to stop her. This was her life’s work. She wasn’t jumping on a bandwagon. She had been talking about this for years. It was just time for people of colour, women, the old and sexual minorities to man up a bit. They had had it far too easy for too long. Time to give the rest of us a break.
