What is racism if not judging on skin colour?

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When I look at current leaders of the Tory Party, I don’t see a single white face. It’s a stupid, racist comment to make, of course. But is it really more racist than Jenrick’s comment that he didn’t see another white face on a visit to an area of Birmingham? How many people did he see, and in how big an area, over that fateful 90 minutes? Without such statistical context, it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about what it means for integration. How much bigger was his sample than the sample of one in the first sentence above? It’s worse than that, though. Suppose all the faces had been white, but they’d all been Poles or Romanians? How would he have known? And why would that have been more acceptable to him?

Both Jenrick and his party leader claim that his remarks weren’t racist, but leaping to a conclusion about the extent to which people are, or can be, ‘integrated’ into UK society (whatever that means – and other than dispersing them more widely geographically, it’s not at all clear that Jenrick knows what it means either) based purely on one visible characteristic, skin colour, is about as close to a textbook definition of racism as one can get. Maybe he really, genuinely isn’t a racist himself, but he knows that more than a few voters are, and he knows how to appeal to their prejudices.

By a curious coincidence (?), Handsworth, the part of Birmingham dishonoured by Jenrick’s presence, just happens to be next door to Smethwick, scene of an infamous electoral battle in 1964 which the Tories won on the basis of a campaign based on the number of non-white faces in the area. The Tory candidate that time round denied being racist too. It’s probably being excessively charitable to suggest that Jenrick might simply be too young to remember how well that worked for his party.

Upping the stakes

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President Trump has been widely (and justifiably) mocked for his promise to reduce the price of medicines in the US by up to 1,500%. It’s an illustration of his somewhat shaky grasp of elementary mathematics, although I suppose it helps to explain how he managed to bankrupt casinos. By and large, UK politicians have not shown themselves to be quite so mathematically challenged as Trump, and the argument about the extent to which immigration should be allowed has largely stayed on the positive side of zero. Until last week.

Robert Jenrick has now attempted to trump Labour, Reform and his own party by calling for a ten year period in which net migration to the UK should be negative. It’s a reduction of more than 100% in the level of immigration, even if it’s not yet quite in the Trumpian league of 1,500%. Give him time. But given what we know about the falling birth rate, he is effectively demanding that the population of the UK should be cut as a deliberate act of government policy. To say that it puts him somewhat outside the normal range of political consensus is an understatement: other politicians (including both Farage and Badenoch) have recently been calling for measures to increase the birth rate to tackle the potential problems associated with a declining population (even though that rather ignores the fact that using an increased birthrate to fill gaps in the UK economy has a rather lengthy lead time). But being outside the consensus is probably what he’s after.

The consequences of a falling population would be significant, not least because those being driven, or encouraged, to leave are likely to be of working age and therefore making a positive contribution to the productive economy. Unless, of course, he wants to offer incentives – which an increasing number of us might even be willing to consider, with madmen like Jenrick and Farage in danger of leading a government – for UK pensioners to emigrate. I suspect not, however: something tells me that predominantly white UK-born people aren’t the ones he wants to get rid of. He hasn’t yet offered a solution to that economic conundrum, and probably won’t. Not only because there isn’t a simple one, but also because spelling out the consequences might somewhat undermine the blatant appeal to prejudice.

It would also be seriously at odds with the rest of his political philosophy. Actually, a reduced population would not, in itself, be an entirely bad thing, ignoring for a moment that merely moving people from one country to another doesn’t exactly achieve an overall reduction. It would reduce the demand for finite resources which is hardly a poor idea, but it would also require a significant rethink in the way the economy works to ensure that economic benefits are shared more equally rather than being increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. That, or force an increasing proportion of the population into poverty, which is not an obvious election-winning strategy, particularly if the deliberately-impoverished come from the voting demographic being wooed by his rhetoric. As they inevitably would. We shall have to see who will attempt to out-compete him, by assigning a hard number to the target for exporting residents in a government-sponsored people trafficking scheme. The way things are going, I wouldn’t put it past Labour to open the bidding.

"They should be paying us"

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Not to be out-done by Starmer’s display of his imperialist credentials, one of the would-be leaders of the Tories went even further yesterday  by saying that former colonies do not only not deserve any compensation for the exploitation of their resources and the enslavement of their peoples, but they should actually be grateful for having been colonised in the first place. Ever willing to add comedy to arrogance, Sirjake added that “they should be paying us”. Perhaps it isn’t completely surprising that people who believe that taking a substantial economic hit in order to gain the illusory ‘freedoms’ of Brexit should also believe that having their resources and people systematically extracted and exploited is a small price to pay for the delights of an English-based law system and the imposition of Christian values.

The thing is, though, it’s not for ‘us’ to decide whether it was a good bargain or not. The only people who can decide whether what they got outweighs what was taken from them are the peoples who were colonised. It’s possible, of course, that some of them really do believe that they got the best end of the deal – one could argue that the earliest English colony of all, Wales, contains plenty who think that there are net benefits from being ruled from elsewhere. It is, however, clearly not the perception of most of the former colonies, and no amount of criticising their ingratitude is going to change that.

And even if it were to be true that, by some sudden strange Damascene conversion, all the former colonies were to agree with the proposition that colonisation had been a good thing, it doesn’t alter the fact that any benefits from colonisation were more accidental than intentional. Colonisation took place with the express intent of gaining access, by force, to resources, and as a process, it made some of the colonisers very rich indeed. Much of the wealth of the UK’s biggest cities came from the exploitation of colonial possessions. It really doesn’t matter how enlightened some (but certainly not all) of the colonisers were or whether the legacy they left was good or bad: nothing can alter the underlying intention of accumulation of wealth by expropriation of resources. The people seeking to rewrite history here are those who seek to deny that basic truth.

Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.