women

An Utterly Sickening Political Charade

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.

The Disenfranchisement Game

One of the first things I came across online this morning was a clip of a Newsnight interview with Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf. It was, of course, the usual hodgepodge of gaslighting and deliberately misleading half truths, but one of the things which caught my interest was that he kept appealing to young, white, working class men. His argument was that they had become disenfranchised: that all the equalities legislation we now have is designed to help members of so many other minorities, it has now placed white working class men at a disadvantage. Such legislation thus now needs to be revised or done away with completely.

This contention caught my attention enough to have me thinking about it all morning. Whether it is true or not, it’s obvious that Yusuf was trying to play a weird kind of disenfranchisement game. Straight white able-bodied men are usually among the least persecuted people in society; but by telling them such legislation has put them at a disadvantage, Yusuf was obviously trying to tap into the growing sense of anger many young men now seem to feel. Many such young men didn’t do well at school or go to university, and now feel overlooked; they now see members of so many other minorities getting degrees and flourishing, and feel frustrated. Nevermind the fact that this might be down to countless other factors, to be told that it was down to equalities legislation and the needs of other people being put before yours, will be very alluring.

The problem is, it pits one group of people against another in an extremely toxic, dangerous way. The reason why such legislation was necessary in the first place was to rebalance the anachronistic inequalities of the past, when people could be refused employment or housing based on their gender, skin colour, sexuality or whatever. That was an era when white, able-bodied men were at an inherent advantage – the very demographic Reform are so desperate to appeal to. Without such equalities legislation, I would never have been able to go to university, use public transport or get my own flat; but while Yusuf tried to claim that there would bee aspects of such acts they would keep, it was obviously that they wanted to return the country to an era when one group of people ruled over all others, and are doing so by pandering to their sense of disenfranchisement.

I hope everyone realises how dangerous this is: by telling them they have become disadvantaged, the scumbags of Reform are trying to mobilise straight, white working class men and pit them against all other demographics, stoking up an intense social rivalry. They are trying to effectively weaponise the sense many working class men now have that they have been left behind by the modern world, as well as their (probably unconscious) feeling of reduced or diminished social standing. The sickening irony is, Reform intend to do away with services which the vast majority of working class people rely on, such as the NHS. More to the point, it gives such people something to blame for their perceived lack of social standing and rank which is baseless, allowing them to feel jealous of the help they see members of other minorities receiving. By telling them they have been left behind by equal rights legislation, it both allows white, working class men to feel disenfranchised and othered, and also lets them blame their victimhood on those they see as ‘other’. In short it is a dangerous pitting of one group against another by appealing to their sense of lost social status, and in doing so seeks to restore social divisions and hierarchies we should have outgrown long ago.