Rishi Sunak’s decision to recall David Cameron from his shepherd’s hut has been hailed as a triumph by centrist dads. They’re convinced that axing nasty Suella Braverman shows that the grown-ups are back in charge. No . 10 insiders are pleased with themselves: one person working in Downing Street told the Sun that the PM’s phone was ‘inundated’ with texts from fellow world leaders welcoming the appointment. But come the next election, Sunak is in for a shock.
The decision to axe Braverman marks the beginning of the end for the PM. Whatever the reason for the Home Secretary’s departure, most voters will see that she was forced out for speaking the truth. In an article for the Times, Braverman made the obvious and pertinent point that policing should be even-handed. She said that no particular ethnic or political group should get preferential treatment at the hands of the law.
The big problem with the ‘anti-racism’ complex is that it doesn’t take some forms of racism seriously enough
Now, she’s gone. But hang on. Forget the political sideshow for a bit and whether or not the edits to the piece suggested by Downing Street were approved. Braverman is right. Pro-Palestine marches in recent weeks have seen displays of blatant racism, with placards reading ‘You’re either on the white or right side of history’, calls for Intifada, to ‘kill all the Jews’ or that ‘Hitler was right’. There has been Hamas cosplay and, on Saturday, a cabinet minister was surrounded by an angry mob. But it was a few hundred rowdy gammons who were the big problem, apparently.
Yes, the sight of far-right protesters on the streets of London was an ugly one. But so too are the naked displays of hate on display at Palestinian solidarity marches, yet the reaction to the latter has been somewhat muted. The big problem with what we might call the ‘anti-racism’ complex – media, NGOs, polite society in general – is that it doesn’t take some forms of racism seriously enough.
The Palestine marches are an existentially serious historical moment, involving blatant shows of open racial hatred on the streets of the UK’s cities, week after week. There are very unpleasant questions about what has been unmasked. But too many people prefer to look away.
This is because anti-racism in its 21st century Western form is a puerile class status game; all too often, it’s a social mechanism for middle class white people to signal their superior virtue to each other. (As most of them are members of that class, the Tories in government are inevitably susceptible to this.) Its practitioners are obsessed with trivia, having the vapours about ‘microaggressions’ or jokes about ethnic stereotypes, but apparently blasé about actual ethnic hatred – and vicious attacks on the Jewish State. Any flavour of ethnic strife in which working class whites are not somehow involved is either ignored or excused away. Racism between people of colour, or against white people, such as the grooming gangs scandal – anything that doesn’t fit with what we might call the ‘Waterstones Recommends’ school of anti-racism – is too embarrassing and gauche to face up to.
But after a month of grotesque antisemitism, a weekly celebration of racist terror disguised, very unconvincingly, as ‘peace marches’, it’s time for us to wake up to what should be an obvious truth: nobody – either individually or collectively, white or black, liberal or right-wing – is above the potential for racism. We are all human, and such savagery is the historical human default between all ethnic groups, wherever and whenever you might look. Our comparatively harmonious modern Western societies make us blind to this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
The removal of Braverman is a terrible sign of the centrist establishment’s failure to comprehend, or even to acknowledge, the awful truth of what the marches have exposed; that there is a sizeable minority of the population that is antisemitic, and that the police cannot and will not enforce the law fairly. Braverman spoke the obvious truth and was defenestrated for it. Bringing back David Cameron is the triumph of ‘calm down dear’-ism, of the lukewarm consensus that got us here in the first place.
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