The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are vastly over-represented in criminality (including sex crimes) and now the clamour for a specific public inquiry into rape gangs formed by Pakistani heritage men.
A long-running and concerted attempt by the political class to sustain a framework that depicted minority groups always as victims and never as victimisers has run its course. The reality that some ethnic minority cohorts have been very difficult neighbours for deprived working-class English communities can no long be suppressed.
Any astute ‘progressive’ political leader would sense a major shift in the tectonic plates of public opinion and be adjusting his tone accordingly.
But there are astute political leaders who are canny setters of winning dividing lines and then there is Keir Starmer. Twice in a row Starmer has sought to pillory white working-class people – and anyone else angry about shocking atrocities – as ‘far right’.
He did this first when rioting occurred following the slaughter of young girls in Southport. Naturally he was correct to condemn the rioters, but his failure to acknowledge the righteous anger of many others was tone deaf. And his failure to deliver similarly robust condemnations of ethnic minority perpetrators of the summer violence gave rise to the nickname ‘Two Tier Keir’.
Now Starmer has used the same ‘far right’ terminology in a bid to discredit anyone who thinks there should be an inquiry into the mass rapes of vulnerable girls in at least 50 English towns by networks of men from Pakistani backgrounds.
Apparently, we are reprehensible for ‘jumping on a far-right bandwagon’. In doubling down on this analysis, the Prime Minister is showing that his summer response to the post-Southport furore cannot be put down to a solitary bad day at the office. His chosen dividing line really is between the establishment elite with its reductive reasoning on race on the one hand and majoritarian, reality-based opinion on the other.
As Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was quick to point out: ‘Starmer is applying Labour smear tactics from 20 years ago and thinks they will work today. He is a man of the past with no answers for today’s problems, let alone tomorrow’s.’
Starmer’s bete noire Elon Musk was even more direct, concluding: ‘What an insane thing to say!’ The real reason Starmer is blocking a public inquiry into the rape gangs, argued Musk, was that ‘it would repeatedly show how Starmer ignored the pleas of vast numbers of little girls and their parents.’ That is no doubt an overstating of the case. But the idea that senior government figures do not want a record of the cover-ups engaged in and blind eyes turned by Labour-run local authorities is hardly far-fetched.
A more subtle and less robotic left-of-centre politician – Tony Blair for instance, or even Jack Straw – would be shoring up our race relations right now by reassuring people that the political system will respond to wrongdoing without fear or favour.
Straw of course was one of the first Labour figures to face the wrath of the woke left on the grooming gang issue when he observed back in 2011 that white girls were viewed as ‘easy meat’ by some men of Pakistani origin.
‘There is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men…who target vulnerable young white girls. We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open,’ added Straw.
The then Labour leader Ed Miliband warned him: ‘We’ve got to be careful about generalisations about particular communities… we find sexual crimes committed by people of all backgrounds.’
Those failed politics of deflection barely worked in 2011 and certainly won’t work now. And yet Starmer is sticking to them, attempting to present a row between Musk and his ministers as a more pressing outrage than the actual mass atrocities committed against young girls from highly vulnerable backgrounds, including in many cases care homes.
Leaders who set their dividing lines in unsustainable places get washed away at the first opportunity offered to the electorate. The freakish thing about Starmer is that although he is doomed by his ineptitude and tunnel vision, he can still lead a march of the zombies for another four years. Race relations in Britain will not be a pretty picture by the end of that.
Isabel Hardman, Natasha Feroze and campaigner Raja Miah discuss the prospect of a public inquiry on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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