Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions provided a rather dispiriting summary of the current political scene. The two leaders of the main political parties ended up having a fight on whose party had the bigger racism problem, sparked by tweets from the US president telling black and minority ethnic Congresswomen to ‘go back’.
Jeremy Corbyn tried to open the session on climate change, but Theresa May had, unsurprisingly, turned up clutching the advert placed by Labour peers in today’s Times, which said Corbyn had ‘failed the test of leadership’ because of his attitude to anti-Semitism.
And so the exchanges moved to a predictable format. Corbyn retorted that his party was the first to pass anti-racist legislation, suggesting that Labour therefore couldn’t be racist, merely because it said it wasn’t. And he then brought up the problem of Islamophobia in the Conservative party, claiming 60 per cent of Tory members think Islam is a threat to civilisation.
Britain’s best politics newsletters
You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate, free for a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first month free.
UNLOCK ACCESS Try a month freeAlready a subscriber? Log in