It is high time that we shine a light on the Left’s ‘stay-in-your-lane’ politics

‘The left’s narrow-minded perception of British minorities has morphed into a self-righteous belief of political ownership.

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‘Abolish the police, dismantle capitalism, and disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family’. These are just a handful of the audacious demands that have been made by the Black Lives Matter movement since the tragic murder of George Floyd.

For many BAME conservatives, who had previously supported the protests, these demands had gone beyond the scope of anti-racism and bordered upon anarchism. Those who have dared to voice their scepticism, however, have been met with vile accusations of ‘race betrayal’ by the liberal left.

Whilst the government’s new Pakistani appointee to head a review into racial inequality was branded a ‘racial gatekeeper’ by Novara journalist Ash Sakar, former footballer Stan Collymore accused black Conservative commentator Candace Owens of ‘playing the c**n’ and being a ‘reliant house n***o’.

This is nothing new, however. For many years now, I have had the unfortunate experience of witnessing many of my conservative-minded minority friends being lambasted by patronising white liberals for supposedly ‘betraying their own race’ and ‘shooting themselves in the foot’. Furthermore, terms such as ‘Uncle Toms’, ‘coconuts’ and ‘Oreos’ are now frequently utilised by leftists who wish to delegitimise and silence BAME conservative voices.

It is high time that we expose this nasty form of liberal identity politics for what it truly is: racism.

In today’s race debate, there is a growing tendency for liberal commentators and activists to treat black people as a monolithic group. Indeed, their ideology takes an extremely one-dimensional approach to race by fabricating preconceived views and ideas about how ethnic minorities are expected to behave and think – often in the same way as white leftists. This notion was exemplified by the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who told an African American swing-voter that if he could not make up his mind between himself and Donald Trump then he could not call himself black.

During his interview on The Brendan O’Neil Show, suspended Labour member and black anti-racism activist, Sir Trevor Phillips, stated: ‘I cannot think of anything more racially denigrating than the presumption your colour makes you absolutely certain to vote this way or that’. He is absolutely right.

The left’s narrow-minded perception of British minorities has morphed into a self-righteous belief of political ownership. In the same way that it took the northern working-class vote for granted, the liberal left has blindly convinced itself that ethnic minorities are its political property and thus castigates all those who fail to conform to its views.

Indeed, further on in his interview, Sir Trevor Phillips accused the liberal left of using people of colour as a useful pawn in its war on capitalism. The British writer and broadcaster suggested that, in the eyes of the left, ‘our [people of colour’s] job is to be downtrodden, oppressed, rebellious and the reason for revolution. And the minute we stop behaving like that, we are going to break that situation, and we become less useful to these people’.

In fact, recent election trends suggest that the left’s monopoly of the minority vote has slowly begun to disintegrate. In the 2019 UK general election, both Hindus and Jews voted in the majority for the Conservative party – a swing which would have seemed impossible just over a decade or so ago. Similarly, in the 2016 US presidential election, we found that the black vote for the Democratic Party fell from 94.6 per cent to 88.8 per cent, whilst the Latino vote dropped from 69.3 per cent to 65.29 per cent.

These recent voting trends reflect the public’s rising unease towards the left’s abandonment of the idea of equality of opportunity, in favour of equality of outcome. A concept which Katharine Birbalsingh believes has constructed a ‘totem pole of oppression’. Indeed, the headmistress of Michaela Community School explains that the left has created a ranking system that deciphers how oppressed one may be allowed to feel, based on how ‘well or badly your group is thought to be doing, educationally and in the workplace’.

She herself became a victim of this construct when activists continually edited her ethnicity on Wikipedia to discredit her comments on education reform, made at the Conservative Party conference. At first, she was described as being of Indian heritage before she was rebranded as an Indian Ugandan which, due to the historical legacy of Idi Amin, insinuated that she may hate black people. In reality, Birbalsingh is half black Jamaican and half Indian Guyanese. At the click of a button, however, her family history was erased, and her arguments were rendered invalid because, in her words, she was deemed ‘not black enough’.

A similar argument was put forward by Labour MP Nadia Whittome who accused Priti Patel of using ‘her identity as an Asian person to silence MP Flo Eshalomi as a black person’. Having spoken out about her own experiences with racism, Labour MPs chose to attack the Home Secretary, as opposed to her abusers, by dangerously implying that Asian experience of racism mattered far less than that of a black person.

The sentiment was not unique to parliamentarians, however. The incident quickly inspired Labour activists to invent the vulgarly short-sighted hashtag ‘Brown Privilege’ which briefly trended on Twitter in the UK. This line of argument on race affirms Marxist philosopher Noam Chomsky’s theory that liberals will demand greater BAME representation in politics until certain individuals fail to satisfy their political agenda. Indeed, the left’s attack on Patel’s speech and other BAME politicians sends a clear message: stay in your lane.

I cannot think of anything more dissuasive to a young girl aspiring to a life in public service than seeing a woman of colour being attacked for bringing up her experiences with racism.

Despite having suffered similar consequences of British imperialism as black Brits, Hindus have been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole of oppression by the left. This is because Hindus often debunk the left’s narrative that Britain is an irredeemably racist country that is hostile to all non-whites. They are largely well-integrated, they are academically successful, they now have higher average earnings than whites in the UK, and have many people in key governmental positions.

Similarly languishing towards the bottom of the pole are British Jews. When the majority of black people in this country claim they are the victims of racism, we rightly believe them. Similarly, when most homosexuals declare that they are suffering homophobia, we rightly believe them. However, when over eighty-five per cent of Jews claimed that Jeremy Corbyn was anti-Semitic, those on the left chose to either ignore them or delegitimise their claims by accusing them of being politically motivated.

Having been a Labour member myself, I remember being shocked at how quickly Labour student debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict would deteriorate into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world’s media. In fact, the official Black Lives Matter Twitter page has recently come under some scrutiny itself after it posted an old anti-Semitic trope which suggested that Israel was ‘gagging’ media outlets.

In one of her most recent social media publications, the British-Yoruba director of the Free Speech Union, Inaya Folarin Iman, maintained that there was a strong correlation between the racial politics of the ‘woke identitarians’ and the white supremacists. More specifically, she explained that both are racial fatalists who argue that race is a person’s defining characteristic, conformity is highly prized, and both believe that different races can never ‘truly understand’ one another.

So why is it that the left cannot fathom the fact that their identity politics may be another divisive form of racism? It is rather simple, actually. It is because they are neither punished nor ‘cancelled’ for their conduct.

French philosopher Michel Foucault once claimed that a form of power lay with those who controlled the dominant discourse in a social structure. Indeed, something which has struck me as particularly interesting during these protests is that the radical left continues to play the victim of a culture war which it has been winning since the election of Tony Blair in 1997. It is they who have monopolised cultural production, they define the boundaries of acceptable speech and they decide who is cancelled and who is not.

The emergence of Black Lives Matter protests has been the perfect opportunity to establish a long-needed dialogue on the issue of racism. It is an opportunity we have currently failed to grasp, however.

As opposed to highlighting the frightening realities of modern-day slavery, we have chosen to engage in futile arguments on pulling down statues of former slave owners. As opposed to looking at the socio-economic specificities of the UK’s racial inequalities, we have opted for a US-style blanket race analysis.

Worst of all, however, we have reduced the serious issue of racism to a box-ticking exercise. Through the posting of a black box or catchy slogan on Instagram, activism has been morphed into a top-down imposed, scripted, copied and pasted formula that supposedly demonstrates that we are not racist whilst cancelling all those who fail to comply.

Furthermore, the Liberal left’s new patronising catchphrase ‘educate yourself’ can easily be translated into ‘re-educate yourself’ – you are officially banned from debating this topic until you conform to my views.

In the words of Headmistress Katherine Birbalsingh: ‘Most people want an easy fix, a stamp of approval that will allow them to be branded a non-racist so that they can go back to their normal lives, satisfied that they are a good person (and certainly better than Tories).’

It is high time that we open-up a serious dialogue on racism. This process can only begin, however, once we grant all minority women (whom we may disagree with) the same right as white men: the right to think and speak for themselves.