Who will oppose Labour’s racial dystopia?

Britain’s ruling class are currently conducting an enormous experiment – perhaps not consciously or intentionally, but with great enthusiasm – to discover the effects of extremely high levels of immigration on British society.

We will not be sure of the result for some time yet. In the meantime, we need to be doing all we can to ensure that our multi-ethnic society remains as harmonious and peaceful as possible. Our overriding aim ought to be reducing and minimising, rather than heightening, the salience of ethnicity as a political issue. Once upon a time, this appeared to be the goal of self-proclaimed anti-racists. In my naïve way, I assumed that they, like me, wished for a future where character and achievement would be much more important than skin colour, where we would relate to each other not as representatives of our race but as fellow humans, fellow fathers, fellow football fans, fellow birdwatchers.

Nowadays, of course, this is much harder to believe. Progressives do not seek a colour-blind meritocracy but rather what amounts to a spoils system, not entirely dissimilar to the old Ottoman millet arrangement.

The goal is implicit and explicit racial quotas and highly intrusive monitoring, across great swathes of both the public and private sectors. If you doubt this, consider the newest round of planned racialist legislation, as trailed recently by Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow women and equalities secretary.

According to the Guardian, the new laws would require that public services – the NHS, police, schools and councils – ‘collect data and issue reports on staffing, pay and, where relevant, outcomes, by ethnicity.’ Additionally Labour wish to mandate ‘ethnicity pay gap reporting, ensuring police officers and staff undertake anti-racism training, and reviewing the school curriculum to ensure it is diverse.’ This is, in other words, an absolute field day for the bureaucrats and commissars of the total state, who will be able to create pointless busywork for each other while further distracting public servants from their essential tasks. Those who support these kind of schemes will argue that they are necessary to protect ethnic minority workers from discrimination, and to enable talented people held back by bigotry to achieve their potential. But all the evidence points to racial prejudice being in steep decline in contemporary Britain, especially in workplaces. And in any case, we already have extremely comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation on the statute books.     

One of the many depressing things about this proposal is the fact that none of the main parties at Westminster are opposed to it. While Tories might not bring forward this kind of legislation on their own initiative, it is very hard to imagine them arguing against it in principle. They have been in government for nearly 14 years now and have steadfastly refused to touch the 2010 Equality Act, which is the source of a large number of the ‘woke gone mad’ stories that make the press.

Formally, the Tory party still believes in individual effort and entrepreneurship rather than group rights or communal horse-trading. But fine words butter no parsnips. It is the actual actions of the Conservative party that we should consider, and the record is pitiful. You will seek in vain for any unequivocal public rebuttal from any senior office-holding Tory of the core premise of the equality and diversity industry, i.e. that disparate outcomes for different ethnic groups are ipso facto evidence of some form of racial discrimination. Individual MPs, or ex-ministers, might make the case, but it hardly matters when the leadership are silent.

This Tory failure – alongside the countless other disappointments and self-inflicted wounds of the last four years – feeds into a growing sense among politically engaged people on the right that Britain is entering a kind of crisis. Nothing seems to work. The police are useless and no one at the Home Office seems able to get a grip on them. Border enforcement is pitiful. Serious sex offenders are being given asylum on their third try, while the housing crisis rumbles on. The student visa system is being scammed more or less openly.

If you want to vote for continued economic stasis, for Net Zero, for mass immigration and weak policing and left-wing indoctrination in schools, you are spoiled for choice. Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the Celtic Nationalists enthusiastically support those policies, while the Tories just end up carrying out these policies anyway because they have insufficient wit, courage or will to do anything else. But what if you don’t want any of the above? Who are you meant to vote for if you want a dynamic economy, reduced immigration, a war on the Blob and reform of policing?  

There is no mainstream party representing the aspirations, ambitions and ideals of conservative-minded folk. The political space that should be occupied by such a party is occupied by the Tories, who are in full rabbit-in-headlights mode ahead of the crushing general election defeat that awaits them later this year. Perhaps it is only from the ruins of a devastating Tory wipeout that an effective and fearless right-wing party can be created.