On Monday, seven Labour MPs resigned the whip to sit as the Independent Group in the House of Commons, and the slide of British politics into the surreal continued apace. Immediately after citing the antisemitism crisis as one of her reasons for quitting the Labour party, Angela Smith joined me in the BBC Politics Live studio and when sharing her thoughts on the nature of racism said “it’s not just about being black or a funny tinge … you know, different - B, err from the BME community”. Whoever had “new splinter group embroiled in racist scandal after three hours of existence” in the parliamentary sweepstakes, please collect your tenner from reception.
To be fair to the honourable member for Penistone and Stocksbridge, there was a context to her comments. I’d been talking about how my family, which is half English by marriage, talks about racism without having to recreate the battle of Spion Kop. I’d said that my stepdad is white, then corrected myself to “more of a pinkish colour” after remembering that his love of gardening is matched only by his disdain for adequate sun protection. Furthermore, it would be callous and ungenerous if I didn’t mention that Smith did apologise a few hours later for “any offence” caused, and in the Twitter video reaffirmed her commitment to “fighting racism wherever [she] finds it”. Including, presumably, the Portcullis House kitchenette where filming apparently took place.
Neither of these things excuse Smith’s comments. Offering a politician’s non-apology that accepts everything but responsibility isn’t the same as accountability. Framing the comment as having “misspoken” treats racism like it’s some involuntary reflex. Someone speaking light-heartedly about their loved one, based on years of shared experience and affection, is not the same as an MP referring to BME people as having a “funny tinge” while gesturing at the only person of colour on a current affairs panel. The latter, besides being buttock-clenchingly gauche, positions people of colour as being inherently abnormal. It suggests that melanin is somehow a stain or an aberration. And if you want to make that joke, at least have the decency to marry my mum first.
It seems that prompting racist brain glitches in British elected representatives is my superpower: it was only a fortnight ago that Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, mixed me up with another brown woman with infinitely better bone structure. After Dorries apologised to, err, Newsbeat for “any offence” she may have caused, the story was promptly forgotten. While it takes a lot more to offend me on a personal level (I went to an all-girls school, the banter was brutal), both these incidents demonstrate a deep problem with how the political establishment, and the media culture at large, react to the mere existence of people of tinge.
On Newsnight, one of the Splinter Seven, Chris Leslie, quickly brushed over his colleague’s comments when asked about them by Kirsty Wark. Despite the clip of Smith’s flub having garnered over a million views on Twitter, it wasn’t featured on Channel 4 News, BBC News at 10 or this morning’s Today programme. It would be utterly unthinkable that a Labour member, let alone an MP, would have been forgiven so quickly for a similar statement at the height of the summer’s antisemitism crisis. The Independent Group, justifiably, have excoriated their former party for the pace and ineffectiveness of its disciplinary procedures. But as they’ve not officially launched a party of their own, they’ve managed to skilfully evade any such criticism of their own internal workings. How would I make a complaint about Angela Smith’s comments? What kind of disciplinary procedure would she face? Have these MPs signed up to a working definition of racism? And when will the establishment media confront the Independent Group over its institutional racism problem?
Angela Smith’s Politics Live appearance exposed a lot more than her own personal squeamishness when it comes to issues of race: it revealed the double standard in political media when it comes to identifying racism on the left, and accountability elsewhere. This isn’t the new politics that the Independent Group promised at their launch – but the same old cycle of racism, rinse, repeat that people of tinge have had to deal with for decades.
