Shabana Mahmood has exposed the racism of the Left.
Ethnic minorities who stray from progressive narratives on immigration face swift and punitive responses from supposed allies
Shabana Mahmood has said the quiet part out loud. For months the Home Secretary has endured the insinuation she is betraying the Left-wing cause, not simply by calling for some control over our dysfunctional and widely abused immigration system but for doing so as a member of an ethnic minority.
Heckled this week for apparently attempting to “out-Reform Reform”, the Home Secretary finally snapped back. “I do think there is that element of [this criticism] which is: ‘How dare you, a brown woman, say a thing we white liberals think you’re not allowed to say?’”
Mahmood’s predecessor but three, Suella Braverman, recently told me that when she famously warned of an “invasion of the southern coast”, her Tory colleagues responded in Westminster’s usual fashion – by averting eyes and pretending not to hear. What Mahmood faces, as a Labour politician, might well be worse. In modern progressive politics there are approved positions, and approved people to hold them. Step outside your lane and the reaction will be both swift and unforgiving.
We’ve seen this dynamic before. When minorities stray from the prescribed narrative of oppression and disadvantage the response is rarely measured; it is immediate, and almost always punitive.
Sir Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and a veteran voice for reason in racial matters, raised concerns about integration and community cohesion, only to be suspended from the Labour Party. As chair of the Race and Ethnic Disparities Commission, the courageous Lord Sewell oversaw a report that concluded Britain was not structurally racist and was met with accusations ranging from naivety to something very like treason.
I spoke to Tony Sewell earlier this month. Unfazed, he made a point that would propel some of the progressive commentariat into orbit: that many British Muslims would probably have voted for Margaret Thatcher. Family, aspiration, community, responsibility – these are not values held dear by white Britons alone. Yet parts of the Left still behave as though ethnic minorities must, by default, belong on “their side”.
Implicit in this is the patronising assumption that minorities are defined by disadvantage – and an intellectual laziness that reduces individuals to an often unwished-for group identity. The same shoddy group-think is now trying to impose the term “global majority”, lumping together Chinese, Bangladeshis, West Africans, Latin Americans and other wildly disparate individuals defined only by being non-white, and therefore having some form of victimhood in common.
But here’s the thing. If the country is no longer institutionally racist – though racism and racial disparities plainly still persist – what happens to the politics built around exposing it? Parts of the Left appear trapped in a kind of nostalgia, living in some romantic fantasy of structural oppression – a playground of goodies and baddies which bears little resemblance to the complexity of contemporary Britain.
The result is distortion and caricature. Hence we’re warned that astrophysics is racist, along with the countryside and even niceness (“Black academics told being ‘nice’ perpetuates ‘white supremacy’”, read one recent headline).
This isn’t the only consequence. Judging by the number of times he’s labelled me a “fascist”, Zack Polanski appears to believe anyone who thinks annual net migration of 906,000 might be a tad high holds “extreme” views. The Left does this to silence dissent, yet remain curiously silent when genuinely offensive, conspiratorial opinions are expressed.
One Green Party candidate called David Lammy a “coconut”; another claimed that 9/11 “was done by the Zionists with Dick Cheney as their executing authority”. A third once posted on Instagram a picture of the Earth entangled in a giant, fang-toothed serpent with the Star of David printed on its skin. The caption? “It’s time to cut the head off this snake.”
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