Don’t let the government fool you into thinking it has no strategy on racism. I know it looks that way, what with the prime minister’s litany of racist statements, the health secretary’s belief that boasting about “diversity of thought” is an appropriate response to the total absence of black people from the cabinet, and the Covid-19 review into race disparity organised in such a way as to alienate the very groups it was meant to help protect. But oafish stupidity is part of Boris Johnson’s electoral brand, and – as usual – beneath it there very much lies a plan.
The first stage, as has been attempted by successive Conservative governments, is to invent a new foe. Black people have often served that purpose. Winston Churchill’s idea of a good slogan for defeating the left in 1955, for instance, was “Keep England white”.
Yet now, after the killing of George Floyd, British people have begun taking an interest in racism I’ve never seen before. Books on race and inequality are topping the bestseller lists; many are completely sold out.
Black Lives Matter protests have been characterised by the huge numbers of white people taking part. Tory heartlands, from Wimbledon – where private school teachers are talking about blackness – to Wiltshire, where the council announced its support for Black Lives Matter, are embracing a new language of progress.
It’s not rocket science to predict that if Britain could become less racist, the rewards of divisive and scapegoating electoral strategies would be greatly diminished. It’s no coincidence that now is the moment Nigel Farage, allegedly a teenage aficionado of the Hitler Youth, has lost his primetime broadcast platform after comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Taliban.
So the Conservatives – reliably on the wrong side of such moments of social change, never mind global pandemic – need a new enemy to convince voters of their relevance. And that enemy is “wokeness”.
Like the alleged demise of free speech, wokeness is one of those things that now only exists in the imagination of those determined to be victims of it. But this week, Downing Street officials were reported to have been actively pushing the prime minister towards reincarnating this imaginary cultural battle, by declaring a new “war on woke”.
Battles need to take place in the real world, however. So these advisers looked down the road to Parliament Square, where Winston Churchill’s statue, despite facing no serious threat, was boarded up with great fanfare.
The prime minister urged us to avoid “photoshopping our history”. He is less quick to say, however, that a first step in that direction would be acknowledging, alongside Churchill’s commendable victory in the second world war, the full litany of abuses and racist acts he carried out.
And not only that. Labelling Churchill a victim of antiracist extremists ignores the fact that his statue has been targeted by almost every large protest movement in recent years, from May Day marches to demonstrations against student fees. As one commentator succinctly put it, where was the backlash then? “Nowhere, because white people did it.”
The point is, Johnson needs to tell people that British cultural pride, for which Churchill’s statue is such a convenient symbol, is under attack. The war on woke is how he plans to defuse calls for racial justice.
The final element of this strategy is to legitimise it by awarding prominent roles to people of colour, acting as his human shields. As long as a small number of black and brown faces speak up for Johnson, however bizarre and out of step their views on racism, his actions and inactions can escape scrutiny.
It’s sometimes said that true equality is when people from ethnic minority backgrounds have as much a right to undermine antiracism work as anyone else. There is a logic to that idea, albeit a profoundly depressing one. Yet the appointment of Downing Street policy chief Munira Mirza – one of a handful of former Revolutionary Communist party members who swung radically to the right – to conduct a review into inequality beggars belief. Mirza believes that “race is no longer the significant disadvantage it was portrayed to be”, that institutional racism is a “myth”, and that even talking about racial bias is akin to “stoking grievance”.
The real irony here, though, is that while Mirza and those in her ideological circle despise what they term “identity politics” – an idea that seems to specifically condemn ethnic minority people who self-organise (when working-class people do it, it’s just “politics”) – this very notion underpins the Tories’ current strategy. Specifically, the party weaponises the identity of any black or Asian person who’s willing to denounce antiracism.
Thus the former party chair James Cleverly was last year rolled out to defend a Tory MP who had blacked-up his face. And this month the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, accused a black journalist of fanning racial tensions for exposing the impact of Covid-19 on British minorities; and the home secretary, Priti Patel, used her own experiences to gaslight a black Labour MP who’d called for stronger action to tackle racism.
Munira Mirza is the latest in line. That the review she is leading is dead on arrival is not such a bad thing – no one asked for it, and hardly anyone thinks it’s the answer to Britain’s continuing racial injustice. But the fact that she fronts it makes clear the government’s plan: incite a war where there isn’t one to obscure the very real problems for which it has no answers.