David Tennant’s acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards was replete with all the telltale signs of ‘Celebrity Activist Syndrome’. He didn’t feel he deserved an award; his views were just ‘common sense’ and ‘human decency’. He has found a cause that just happens to confirm that he is a really great guy, which is the best kind of cause if you ask me. The cause in question is gender identity ideology, for which Tennant has become a prominent activist, though his activism mostly seems to involve wearing a variety of T-shirts with surly slogans. And while trans lives matter, it seems others don’t, for Tennant also used his gong show gushfest to say that such awards would be necessary ‘until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore’. After a brief pause, and cheering from the audience, he added: ‘I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.’
Badenoch remains to be convinced. She responded to Tennant on X, saying:
‘I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.’
This rejoinder neatly captures both Tennant’s vapid politics and the material stakes of the gender battle. Tennant speaks untruth to power while receiving an award from power, safe in the knowledge that it’s not his rights or wellbeing at risk. But Badenoch didn’t stop there, and added:
‘A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.’
With this sentence, her response became as disingenuous as Tennant’s speech. His comments were obnoxious and there is a case to be made that they were sexist. What they were not about is race. Tennant didn’t mention it and no fair-minded reading of his words would find any element of race in them. Yet Badenoch frames them in those terms, identifying Tennant by the colour of his skin and she by hers. It is she who brought race into this matter, not him, unless of course she is suggesting that Tennant’s remarks had a racial motivation, for which I see no evidence.
My guess is that Badenoch knows that race had nothing to do with Tennant’s petty, pathetic jibes. I suspect she thought: ‘He would never get away with saying that about a black female Labour politician’, and in that moment her frustration at that double standard caused this scourge of identity politics to give in to its temptations. If that is what happened, it’s entirely understandable. There is a double standard. Had a right-wing celebrity – they exist! – spoken of, say, the MP Janet Daby in the same terms, perhaps in relation to her pro-Palestinian views, the reporting would be very different. It must be infuriating to see a section of the news media behaving like watchdogs when your opponents are criticised and poodles when you are criticised – but that doesn’t make an appeal to identity politics any more valid. It’s how a progressive argues and that was supposed to be Badenoch’s selling point: unlike most Conservative MPs, she’s actually a conservative.
My guess is that Badenoch knows that race had nothing to do with Tennant’s petty, pathetic jibes
There are some obvious rebuttals to my criticism. There is the ‘how dare a white man’ option but that only makes my point for me. Badenoch’s invoking of race is objectively wrong because it’s objectively wrong. Subjectivity or ‘lived experience’ or whatever it’s called this week isn’t entirely irrelevant but nor does it trump observable fact (Tennant did not speak about race) or moral principle (the importation of US-style victimhood politics is poisonous, divisive, at odds with our history and ought to be resisted).
Another possible comeback is the chin-stroking tactical justification that says Badenoch is merely holding progressives to their own standards — playing the left at its own game. This is, I’m sorry to say, a point that only reveals the naïveté of those who advance it. Politics isn’t about accountability, it’s about power. The object isn’t to hold people to their own standards but to hold them to yours. To change laws, conventions and social mores so that you set the parameters in which their movements and ideas operate. There is no cosmic umpire awarding points for fairness or consistency and appeals to either will have no effect on progressives. They do not believe in fairness or consistency. They cannot and will not see your point of view and are not prepared even to grant that you have the right to express it. They are good. You are evil. And they want to beat you by any means necessary. Crying hypocrisy is an appeal to rules they do not recognise. The culture war is not a debate, it’s a power struggle. Adopting progressive rhetoric only reinforces progressive ideology.
Don’t believe me? Go back and read Badenoch’s response again. The ‘only black woman in government’? Why is that? Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow team has five black women in it. Why can the Tories only find room for one? Do the Conservatives not think black women are capable enough to be government ministers? Will all the candidates to succeed Rishi Sunak pledge to increase black female representation on the shadow frontbench? If not, why not? This is the kind of noxious racial discourse you invite when you use the language of identity politics. There is no exemption for owning the libs. Talk like them and you strengthen them. Kemi Badenoch ought to know that. Kemi Badenoch doesknow that.
I’m pretty unusual for a liberal in that I quite like Badenoch. I like that she’s smart. I like that she’s funny. I like that she’s conversant in Thomas Sowell, not only because it’s near heretical for a Tory MP to have read Black Rednecks and White Liberals but because it’s near heretical for a Tory MP to show an interest in political ideas of any kind. She’s too keen on Margaret Thatcher and her fiscal instincts are more Eighties than J.R. Ewing, Swatch watches and the Berlin Wall, but she’s got brains and guts and the right amount of toughness. She doesn’t need identity politics, she has her own.
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