Needless to say, what is going on in Birmingham today only has my utter contempt and revulsion. Essentially a party of rich, quazi-aristocratic white men is using the black woman who they currently call their leader to articulate their draconian, right wing world view. At the end of the day, it’s an utterly sickening charade. Now, of course I realise how bigoted that pronouncement may well sound: obviously, there is nothing stopping anyone of any race or gender holding any political view they wish, or rising to the leadership of any political party, right wing, left wing or whatever. Yet surely the elephant in the room – the truth we all know to be true but dare not speak – is that the tories are just using Badenoch as their leader in order to appear like an open, tolerant, twenty-first century party while clinging desperately to the right wing views we as a society urgently need to grow out of. As I was saying a couple of days ago, low tax neoliberal politics boils down to greed: It is a disdain for sharing, designed to allow the wealthy, privileged few to retain their fortunes while those who need help are left to fend for their selves, often cap in hand. Thus Badenoch will argue today for a reduction in inheritance tax while saying that the state has grown too large and should be slashed.
I’m sure I won’t be the only person to find this perverse, even sickening. Here we have a party funded by and representing the most privileged people in society using a black woman to try to present their anachronistic intolerant views as somehow socially progressive. This is a group of people who think political authority should be their birthright; who think the wealth they had the good fortune to be born into is incontestable, socioeconomic class is simply part of who they are, and that they have a right to look down on everyone else. Never mind that such notions ultimately get us nowhere, and just perpetuate division, inequality and injustice. Never mind that they are simply a way to conserve authority in the hands of the few, while the rest of us go without. To the tories, their worldview cannot be argued with: class is part of who they are, social division cannot be contested, their wealth was earned rather than inherited and contributing to society via tax must be avoided wherever possible. For all their meritocratic pretensions (or delusions) the unwavering Tory belief in free market capitalism boils down to a mechanism of preserving wealth and therefore sociopolitical authority in the hands of those who are born into it: straight, white able bodied men.
Thus they will gather in Birmingham today and applaud Kemi Badenoch, thinking that they’re being oh-so-progressive and modern, while she simply spouts the same anachronistic Thatcherite platitudes they have always clung to. It is a spectacle I will find utterly obscene. Having a woman of non-European ancestry articulate such ideas does not change the fact that they are simply a way to maintain wealth, privilege and authority in the hands of the few while the rest of society is left to rot. I know we should avoid viewing things in such terms, and that someone’s skin colour should not matter. Yet how can anyone fail to observe that the tories are simply putting on a pantomime to make the views we rejected so vehemently last year somehow appear more up-to-date. Framed in that way, paradoxically perhaps, it is the use of a black woman as their leader which is in a way racist.
