Is the British mainstream of politics edging back from the abyss of Wokeism? For years, under the thumb of extremists like Stonewall, BLM and Extinction Rebellion, virtually no mainstream British politician has dared do anything but take the knee and pretend that men in dresses are as female as any birthing person.
But, as the Conservative Party races to replace Boris Johnson, an out-of-field contender is fast emerging. Kemi Badenoch is, at the moment, a long shot to win the Tory leadership, the fact that she’s even in serious contention indicates that a seismic shift is happening in British politics — given her propensity for kicking back against the pricks of wokeism.
Even now, months after the event, Labour MPs have not forgiven Kemi Badenoch for saying that Britain is one of the best countries in the world in which to be black. It was during the Black Lives Matter protests and many politicians — including Sir Keir Starmer — were ‘taking the knee’ to show fealty to its cause. Badenoch took a different view, seeing within all this a pernicious ideology that portrays blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression. In parliament this week, she went further: this, she said, is ‘critical race theory’ — a new enemy for the Tory party and, as equalities minister, one for her to fight.
Contrary to the CRT/BLM narrative that the West is a racist hell-hole where blacks are ruthlessly exploited by “systemic racism”, Badenoch points out the unthinkable fact: Britain is one of the best places in the world to be black. Badenoch rates the UK even better than the US, but that can be forgiven as British patriotism. As black economist Walter E. Williams pointed out, if black America was its own country, it would be one of the wealthiest in the world. Blacks may be one of the poorest groups in America, but they’re the richest black people in the world.
Badenoch also points out that CRT is, in fact, a deeply racist ideology. Its proponents, she says, ‘actually want a segregated society.’
‘There is a left-wing view of racial politics that’s assumed to be the black view of politics. Being black is not just about being a minority. On a global scale we are not a minority — but the rhetoric in this country is talking about us as if we are almost a separate sub-species.’
Spectator
A Tory equalities agenda, she says, should be based on Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ — that people should be judged ‘on the content of their character’ and not the colour of their skin. ‘Now, it’s all about the colour of your skin. That cannot be,’ she says emphatically. ‘You can’t pick and choose the rules depending on the colour of someone’s skin. That is what the racists do.’
But it’s not just the wicked Tories finally standing up to the bullying nonsense of woke-ism.
When Kemi Badenoch launched her bid to be PM, the “gender neutral” toilets were conspicuously taped over with signs saying, “Men” and “Ladies”. Over on the Opposition benches, she may have something of an ally in Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
“Biology is important. A woman is somebody with a biology that is different from a man’s biology. We’re seeing in sport sensible decisions being made about who cannot compete in certain cases.”
That was Reeves, speaking in a recent Sunday Times interview.
She says she would ‘have a problem’ with someone with male genitals identifying as a woman and using a female changing space, and isn’t entirely sold on the use of gender pronouns. ‘You don’t have to say to someone, “Shall I call you he or she?” – it’s pretty obvious. But there are also difficult cases of somebody who is born as one sex and defines as another. I wouldn’t want to deny their right to define themselves in the way they want to be defined.’
Even by the standards of recent days, that’s pretty punchy. In particular that line on rejecting pronouns because ‘it’s pretty obvious’ strikes me as potentially controversial. I certainly know people and groups who would find that offensive. No candidate in the Tory race has thus been so outspoken on sex and gender.
Spectator Australia
Of course, Labor leader Keir Starmer is still paying mealy-mouthed lip service to the idiotic notion that not calling hulking brutes in high heels and lippy “ma’am” and letting them win all the girls’ sporting events, is going to send them shrieking off to kill themselves. But Reeves is openly backing banning “transwomen” from women’s sports and women’s space, and she’s rejected the Orwellian garbage of pronoun policing.
There’s hope yet.