FEB 21, 2024
Keir Starmer ‘takes the knee’, June 2020
When Keir Starmer won the Labour Party leadership contest in 2020, we were told the ‘adults were back in the room’. Despite having campaigned for radical left-winger Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister, Keir Starmer presented himself as a moderate, competent technocrat without the radical politics of his predecessor.
And many in the media class were all too happy to go along with this story. They wanted to believe the populist revolts of the 2010s, symbolised by Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, and Boris Johnson, were finally coming to an end. It suited them, psychologically, to pretend the Brexit realignment was over and that a new generation of leaders, symbolised by Starmer and Rishi Sunak, heralded a return to the pre-Brexit status-quo and to people who looked and sounded a bit like them.
But take a serious look at Keir Starmer’s plans for Britain, take a serious look at what a future Labour government will likely do once it wins power this year, which it almost certainly will, and it soon becomes clear there’s nothing moderate about Starmer’s plans at all. On the contrary, the rapidly approaching Labour government is about to put the radically progressive cultural revolution that’s already been sweeping through Britain for many years on steroids. Starmer’s Labour, in short, is about to use its immense political, electoral, and cultural power to import a very crude, a very divisive, and a very unBritish racial politics from America and hardwire it into the very fabric of our country and its institutions.
Increasingly, in ways I’m about to explain, the British people and their institutions are about to be exposed to the same highly contested, deeply dubious, and very flawed theories and dogmatic ideologies which have been tearing America apart —from the mainstreaming of the very divisive Critical Race Theory (CRT), which contends all Western nations are ‘institutionally racist’ and that any disparity in outcomes among groups must be because of that racism, to a doubling down on the new elite’s obsession with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.
The end result, for reasons I’ll explain, is a plan that will make Britain a far more divided country. A country where our children will increasingly be told that the only interesting and significant thing about them is not the content of their character but their fixed racial, sexual, or gender identity. A country where different identity groups will increasingly be pitted against one another in zero-sum battles for recognition, power, resources, and even government contracts. And a country where much of our politics and national life will be even more strongly shaped around this crude racial politics. So, here’s what you can expect from a Labour government. Here’s why I’m worried about what’s about to happen. And here’s why I think it’s about time we all started to wake-up and realise what is happening around us.
When people ask me what to expect from a future Labour government they are usually referring to economics. What is Labour’s strategy for growth? What will it do when it comes to tax and spend? And is a wealth tax really off the table?
But the reality is that the next Labour government, much like the current Tory government, will have remarkably little room for manoeuvre. With almost non-existent growth, declining GDP per head, an enormous pile of debt, collapsing public services, and low productivity, when it comes to economics Labour will have very little space at all. Which is why culture will be very important.
Labour, as we’ve already seen with its shifting stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict, will have to spend considerable time making one concession after another to its various ‘stakeholder’ groups, partly to demonstrate ‘quick wins’ but also to keep its increasingly fragmented, divided, and incoherent electorate together.
And the easiest way for the party to do that will be to ‘lean in’ to the cultural revolution that is already sweeping through the country —a revolution which is imposing the values, beliefs, tastes and priorities of radical progressives, who represent no more than 15% of Britain’s population, on the rest of the country.
It is a revolution, in short, which is led by people who genuinely believe Western nations like Britain are ‘structurally’ or ‘institutionally racist’, and hence need to be ‘deconstructed’ and/or dismantled. They oppose Western values at every turn. They consistently say they would sacrifice things like free speech and free expression on the altar of ‘social justice’. And they reject much of our national and cultural inheritance, which they see as a source of shame and embarrassment. Furthermore, they want to reshape Western societies around a very crude and simplistic divide between the ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ identity groups, which are pitted against one another in a South Africa-style competition for recognition and resources.
This revolution has been a long time coming. While its roots can be traced back over decades, in Britain key pieces of legislation such as the 2010 Equality Act and Public Sector Equality Duty helped to usher it along, creating a growing army of socially liberal if not radically woke graduates and bureaucrats who, today, hold very comfortable and influential positions as ‘Equality and Inclusion’ officers in Britain’s universities, hospitals, and civil service. The cash-strapped NHS, for example, was recently estimated to be spending at least £40 million on ‘diversity and inclusion’ officers. Our similarly cash-strapped universities are spending at least £30 million a year on the same ‘equality, diversity, and inclusion’ roles. And the BBC, too, is now spending around a million a year on ‘diversity and inclusion’ staff while ring-fencing £100 million for ‘diverse content’. I could go on.
These activists use these sinecures to further embed these divisive theories about race, sex, gender, our history and Western nations, almost all of which are imported from America, into Britain’s public and private institutions —imposing racial, sexual, and gender quotas on hiring decisions, rewiring institutions around highly political and contested ideologies, and undermining the spirit of meritocracy, which once made Britain one of the most successful, prosperous societies on earth.
And now, what is clear, is that the rapidly approaching Labour government is preparing to take this cultural revolution to a whole new level, drafting even more radical and divisive racial laws.
In April of 2020, the same month Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party, the party appointed Baroness Lawrence as a race relations adviser. She immediately launched the Lawrence review into the disparate impact of Covid on black and minority ethnic communities (Covid, remember, was also ‘racist’).
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, quickly pledged to bring forward a new Race Equality Act to tackle ‘structural racism’ before later, alongside his deputy Angela Rayner, quickly ‘taking the knee’ to align himself and the Labour Party with Black Lives Matter (BLM) —with what was very clearly, even then, a revolutionary group calling for the overthrow of not just ‘racial injustice’ but the entire capitalist system.
The proposals in Labour’s legislation are far more radical than Labour’s proposed investment in green energy or pledges to close tax loopholes. Labour’s drafted Race Equality Act, launched earlier this month, promises, among other things, a full curriculum review for diversity in schools. This means your children will be taught even more divisive narratives about how Britain is a systemically racist society and how they should either atone for their ‘white guilt’ or prioritise their racial identity.
It will also make it much easier for people from minority racial and ethnic groups to bring claims over pay against their employers because they would no longer have to prove “direct discrimination”. Paying people less on the basis of race and ethnicity is, in fact, already illegal. So all this will do is further embed US-style racial and identity conflicts into the very fabric of British society, turning different groups against one another and feeding the legal and charity industrial complex that will become even more obsessed with this issue, wasting millions of pounds along the way. Indeed, Starmer has already made it abundantly clear he has no problem at all with major institutions, such as the National Trust, wrapping themselves in this woke ideology and pushing a very warped view of our ‘racist’ history.
Labour’s proposed Race Equality Act will also open the door for more lawsuits that will bankrupt local services, much like the recent case of a £760 million equal pay lawsuit in Birmingham which helped bring on the council’s financial collapse. Put simply, expect lots more of this as our entire national life and conversation become even more tightly organised around claims of pay gaps and endemic racism.
The new laws will require public services and public institutions to collect even more data and reporting on staffing, pay, and outcomes by ethnicity, thereby further enshrining race-based disparities and positive discrimination as guiding principles in our national life. From the NHS and the civil service to police and schools, staff will also be pushed even more than they are now to engage in ‘anti-racism training’ (which has been shown to be deeply flawed), and to focus endlessly on rooting out and addressing any and every group-based disparity. As Tom Slater notes:
“There are various reasons why some groups are thriving while others are struggling that have nothing to do with racism or discrimination, from geography to family structure to – above all – social class. But race is the prism through which every issue must now be understood, it seems. We must deny any progress has been made and ignore any inconvenient facts that do not buttress The Narrative.”
And make no mistake: much of this activity will also be focused on influencing the next generation, embedding this race-based dogma in our society for decades to come. Thangham Debbonaire, for example, Labour’s Shadow Culture Secretary, just came out in support of teaching children about ‘white privilege’, a highly-contested idea drawn straight out of Critical Race Theory and which has already been shown to reduce sympathy for working-class whites.
Is this really what we should be teaching our children? When levels of racism and prejudice in Britain have, according to major surveys in the social sciences, never been lower, is racialising our children and young people the best way forward?
Treating our children this way, encouraging them to only see the world through this reductive and divisive lens, where they either belong to an evil racist ‘oppressor’ group or a virtuous, ‘victimised’ minority, is a recipe for disaster. While pretty much every piece of evidence suggests levels of racism have never been as low as they are today, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party now appear intent on trying to convince everybody we are living in a deeply racist hellhole. And that includes our children.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In February of last year, it was also revealed Labour was reviewing giving ‘black-led’ firms privilege access to government contracts. David Lammy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, has called for ‘community courts’ to reduce the number of BAME men being sent to prison. We can all see where this type of thinking will lead us. Look at Minnesota in America where left wing activists tried to ‘decriminalise’ fare evasion on the grounds penalties disproportionately impact black people.
Radical activists in Britain, like Dr Shabna Begum of the Runnymede Trust, will also be pressuring Labour to drive this division even further when they are in power. She has criticised Starmer’s Race Equality Act as too mild, telling the Guardian she believes racism is ‘sewn in to the very fabric of the system’ in Britain:
“Labour must use the Race Equality Act as a platform to commit to an ambitious, cross-governmental approach”, said Begum, earlier this month, “supported with sustained investment addressing the unacceptable – and in some cases worsening – disparities in health, housing, wealth and policing, faced by so many communities of colour.”
Begum was invited to speak at Labour Conference this year, alongside Alison McGovern, a Labour MP. So don’t believe the spin about a changed Labour party for a second. When it comes to race, when it comes to identity politics, this is a party that’s about to push the pedal down on radical woke ideology, not least to try and satisfy those various ‘stakeholders’ fighting it out for power and patronage.
And that’s before we even get started on gender.
Underneath the spin about Keir Starmer rowing back on gender self-identification, much of which followed the Scottish National Party’s disastrous attempt to allow children to legally change their gender without medical supervision, Labour is clearly still planning to introduce a raft of pro-trans legislation once in office.
This includes abolishing safeguarding panels for gender recognition certificates and making it easier for doctors to ‘affirm’ individuals gender choice. Starmer himself promised a room full of trans activists he’d look at criminalising mis-gendering people with tougher hate crime laws. And he’s also being lobbied to introduce a new definition of ‘transphobia’ which will have ‘zero tolerance’ for ‘hate’. Where this will leave campaigners who worry about the continued erosion of women’s sex-based rights, and where this will leave free speech and free expression, remain unclear.
Do you think people should go to jail for calling a man a man, and a woman a woman? Do voters in the Red Wall believe that? Of course not. Which is why Keir Starmer and the people around him are trying to cover up their intentions with the narrative the Labour Party is a reformed, reasonable, moderate party.
The trick behind Starmer’s politics is to give friendly sounding names to very radical ideas and theories that have been imported from abroad. An utterly divisive racial politics which views different identity groups as locked in a never-ending, zero-sum battle for power, for example, is dressed up as “equality”, or “inclusion”.
Most British people agree with equality for opportunity. But they do not want Critical Race Theory (CRT) taught to their kids. They do not want to live in a society where schools offer extra lessons to black children that are not offered to white children, where children are segregated into racial “affinity groups”, or where elite schools are downgraded because their teachers are obsessed with these ideas.
Nor do they want want 16-year-olds or, for that matter, foreign nationals to be given the vote in British elections. Or judges in the criminal justice system cowed by accusations of racism. Or government departments awarding lucrative contracts to companies based on their racial makeup. Britain is not South Africa.
A Conservative Party that genuinely understood it’s constituency would be fighting against all this —and doing so loudly. But, over the last fourteen years, the Tories have simply shown themselves unable to rise to the challenge. With more than a decade in power, including most recently an eighty-seat majority, the Tories could have repealed or reformed things like the 2010 Equality Act, which financially and legally empowers their opponents and the woke industrial complex.
They not only failed to do this but failed to reform the entire legislative foundation put in place by the 1997-2010 New Labour governments, which now underpins the country and the cultural revolution that’s sweeping through it. Instead, Rishi Sunak and the Establishment Tories are fighting on political ground they feel comfortable on. They are happier to lose an election talking about taxes than trying to win an election by actively opposing the onslaught of this woke ideology.
Criticising the DEI agenda, criticising CRT, criticising the woke, is simply outside the Overton Window for Sunak and today’s Tory MPs, who consistently lean much further to the cultural left than the average voter and, especially, their new, post-2016 voters. Tories either view these issues as ‘low-status’, as beneath them, or, to be frank, are too stupid to understand what is going on around them.
Many would rather appear on Newsnight to complain about microaggressions or, like Steve Baker, follow in the footsteps of Keir Starmer by uncritically embracing white privilege and revolutionary groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM), which we now know were engaged in widespread fraud and corruption before aligning themselves with the radical Islamist terrorist group Hamas. Most of the Tory establishment, in short, would prefer to fail gracefully in 2024 and rebuild in opposition as a fiscally conservative party of business that keeps its nose clean of ‘the culture wars’.
But they are in for a very rude awakening.
As the political winds sweeping through America and Europe show, there is an enormous
amount of space for national, not establishment, conservatives who are willing to take the fight to the cultural left on these issues, who have grasped the fact these so-called ‘culture war’ issues are closer to being an 80-20 than a 50-50 issue, with eight in ten voters typically rejecting the dreary, depressing, and utterly divisive view of their country peddled by today’s woke left.
Most people do not want to live in this kind of society. Most people recognise that the world is far more complicated than these simplistic, race-based narratives would have us believe. And most people can now see where this growing obsession with identity politics and setting up zero-sum racial conflicts is going to take us.
But the Tories, for their part, have failed to realise this. They’ve gone along with, rather than overturned, the dominant zeitgeist. They appear incapable of recognising and responding to these threats to our way of life. And this way of life is important. Britain, historically, was always a country that rejected radical and extremist ideologies; it was never a country that welcomed them with open arms.
But with Labour on the cusp of taking power that is exactly what Britain looks set to become; a weak, divided, and race-obsessed country that is embracing dodgy and divisive ideas from abroad. We can and should be doing much better than this. So, with the Tories visibly failing on yet another issue, the only question is who is willing to step into this space and defend our cultural heritage and ways of life? Because one thing is clear: if the Tories do not then it’s only a matter of time before somebody else does. And I for one hope they turn up very soon.
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