Behold the exquisite hypocrisy of the Labour MP Dawn Butler. This is a politician who has raised the alarm over the verbal abuse received by female MPs. And yet now she’s gleefully telling anyone who will listen that she agrees with the preening luvvie David Tennant who said Kemi Badenoch should ‘shut up’ and, better still, disappear off the face of the Earth entirely. So sexist barbs are fine if they’re aimed at Tory ladies, Dawn?
Is it acceptable again for men to tell women to pipe down?
Yes, Ms Butler, the MP for Brent Central, has weighed in with her usual tact to the Tennant-Badenoch showdown. It was at the LGBT Awards last Friday that Tennant took aim at Badenoch. As he accepted his gong for best ‘celebrity ally’ to the LGBT community, the former Dr Who said he was looking forward to a time when ‘we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore’. In the meantime, while she annoyingly insists on still existing, ‘I just wish her to shut up’, he barked.
Did I miss a memo? Is it acceptable again for men to tell women to pipe down? There was a horrible Seventies feel to Tennant’s outburst. It was like he’d been possessed by the spirit of Bernard Manning. How striking that #BeKind types say the unkindest things, in this case going so far as to wish a woman into oblivion.
And what did Badenoch do to deserve this public shaming, this weird yearning for her non-existence? She bristled at the excesses of trans activism. She raised concerns about the undermining of women’s privacy and dignity if we allow men who claim to be women to go wherever they please. For this, for standing up for the truth of sex and the rights of women, she is mauled and damned by ‘trans allies’ like Tennant who seem to desire nothing less than her exile from humanity.
Surely Ms Butler, who has spoken out about the targeting of black female politicians by trolls and oddballs, rushed to give solidarity to Badenoch? Not a bit of it. She sided with Tennant. She took to X to say: ‘Not all Black women think the same. I agree with David Tennant. That’s it, that’s the tweet.’
You agree with David Tennant on what? That the most prominent black female politician in Britain should ‘shut up’? That it would be a good thing if she no longer existed?
What happened to the trendy liberal slogans of ‘Listen to black women’ and ‘Lift up women’s voices’? I guess they don’t apply if the black woman in question is saying things the bourgeois left disapproves of. Then it’s ‘Shut up, lady’.
Just imagine if a white Tory bloke gave a speech in which he wished for Diane Abbott to shut her gob. Or if some posh thespian said he can’t wait for the day when Zarah Sultana no longer exists. There would be all-out rage among the right-on. And Butler would be at the forefront of it. Yet when these things are said of Badenoch, Butler shrugs. Worse, she agrees.
This ‘disrespect [for] black women’ in public life is ‘shocking’, Butler once said. Yet she is alarmingly blasé about the disrespect heaped on Badenoch. It really was disrespect. For a man to tell a grown woman and holder of high office to ‘shut up’ is arrogant in the extreme. To be so dismissive of Badenoch’s views on the trans question that she forged through years of reading and consultation is highly insulting. But it seems disrespecting a black woman is fine in this case.
The fallout from the Tennant-Badenoch saga tells a larger story about the ruthlessness of the left’s new racial thinking. It confirms that black women like Badenoch are afforded none of the protections of political correctness because they have the ‘wrong’ views. They have refused to bow down to correct-think and so they are denied the support given to other, more agreeable black women who find themselves under attack. Instead they are left to fend for themselves, as a kind of punishment for their uppity defiance of elite consensus opinion.
Essentially, Badenoch is seen as a ‘bad black woman’, as one of those ethnic-minority people who has the temerity to think for themselves rather than nodding along dutifully with whatever passes for ‘progressive’ ideology these days. Well, screw them — it is precisely Badenoch’s independence of mind and willingness to stand up for truth that makes some of us think she’ll be a great leader of the Conservatives one day.
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