There is much about the modern Labour Party to make the stately politicians from its past turn in their graves.Think of Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, embarrassing themselves at the Pride Parade in London in 2022. Gay anthems played as Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll, before Keir Starmer followed suit. This was before his current incarnation as ‘Starmer the Statesman’. This was ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks. He even sported his customary Barney Rubble look of confusion as though struggling with two thoughts simultaneously. Perhaps he was trying to remember who the Weather Girls were, and what made them biological women. But it is London mayor Sadiq Khan who is surely most responsible for sending those regal figures from Labour’s past spinning in their graves. His identitarian posturing is ceaseless, his support for voguish causes tireless. He embodies perhaps all that is wrong with the modern Labour Party.

11 mins 51 secs read

___________________________________________________________________

Today is Stephen Lawrence Day. It commemorates the 30th anniversary of the lethal stabbing of 18-year-old Lawrence in Eltham, south-east London, at the hands of a gang of young men. Initially, six suspects were arrested but not charged, before the Lawrence family launched an unsuccessful private prosecution against five of them in 1994. It was not until 2012, after a change in the law allowing individuals to be tried twice for the same offence, that two of the gang were eventually convicted of Lawrence’s murder. Do I need to add more details? Isn’t this one instance where the name of the victim – Stephen Lawrence – is enough to conjure up a tragedy and summon a sequence of events?Many will be able to immediately recall that photograph of the teenager in a blue and white striped top. It is sometimes cropped to remove Lawrence’s slightly raised fist, as if some fear this gesture would take away from the severity of the crime in some way. But arguably, the canonisation of Lawrence has already done this.

11 mins 34 secs read

_____________________________________________________________________

Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent. Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin. Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the class she was born into.

10 mins 15 secs read

_____________________________________________________________________

When it comes to race and the left – certainly the wealthy white left, definitely the middle-class left – it is as if left-wingers have not progressed since being unceremoniously exposed as a type by Tom Wolfe, in his mammoth essay, ‘Radical Chic’, over half a century ago. Other writers also had their number, including black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The event Wolfe documents may not be familiar to a rising generation charting similar territory as chic revolutionaries on social media. It’s therefore worth providing a summary here. In the season of radical chic, as Wolfe refers to it, super-rich celebrities and socialites were indulging in a political cocktail of nostalgie de la boue and noblesse oblige, by staging fundraising parties – where sumptuous hors d’oeuvre were served – at New York duplexes on Park Avenue. Their pet causes were those raised by ethnic groups who were politicised – often rightfully so – by grievances that needed airing, axes that needed grinding.

12 mins 33 secs read

_____________________________________________________________________

Even before Brexit, the attitude of many in the Labour party towards traditional working class voters had been closer to contempt than camaraderie. Last week was not only the sixth anniversary of the result, but the point when the left momentarily ditched minority issues. Trade unionism replaced transgenderism as a priority, in support of the RMT union — an organisation left-wing Remainers previously condemned for urging its members to vote Leave. These workers were once again comrades-in-arms, because the industrial action was an opportunity to create chaos and, possibly, bring down a Tory government. Labour has failed to do as much via the ballot box for over a decade. Last week the party also clawed back a seat in the red wall which it lost in the 2019 general election, and failed to reclaim in the recent council elections. Yet the Wakefield by-election may be a false dawn, as many former Labour voters disenchanted with the Tories stayed home. The working class remains Labour’s lost cause.

8 mins 9 secs read

_____________________________________________________________________

William F. Buckley once said that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams should never be on the same flight because if the plane went down it would mean the death of America’s only black conservatives. Somehow the right summing up these two brilliant, maverick intellectuals as conservative seemed to sell them short, while their rational stance on race pitted them against a left that expected like-minded views from black Americans on this topic. Even in his dotage Sowell is subjected to this, as when one of his books was reviewed by an academic from the London School of Economics who assumed the author was “a rich white man”. Sowell has referred to the predominantly white intellectual elite of the left — those quick to classify the minds of minorities — as “the anointed”. He, Williams and the fellow travellers inspired and influenced by these men’s output over the years, have been called other names along the way. In the eyes of say, President Biden, these figures aren’t officially black because they don’t vote Democrat, while others had names for them that should have been consigned to history — Uncle Tom, “coon”, “house negro” — like those ancient racial slurs once favoured by Klansmen.

10 mins 6 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

Some stories stay with you and never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them. One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.mThe details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton was charged, but films relating to Richard Everitt have been conspicuous by their absence. This is therefore an apposite moment to tell a story I’ve attempted to tell previously.

14 mins 29 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

In the opening years of this century I wrote a book, The Likes Of Us, on the white working class. Several newspapers bid to run an excerpt. I opted for the Guardian as it was those on the left from the middle class upwards that were the most disparaging about this particular tribe. They mocked them and demonised them. Currently they order them to check their “privilege”; to kowtow to the false narratives of the Black Lives Matter cult. Yet this class remains the cornerstone of a silent majority whose angry silence makes itself known via the polling booth, rather than toxic riots. The Likes Of Us won the Orwell Book Prize. The runner-up, Andrew Marr, wrote in his Telegraph column the next day the win was a testament to Blair’s meritocratic Britain. (In short, I was an interloper, a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.) I’d used my experience growing up in south-east London as the springboard for the story of an urban class over centuries.

15 mins 21 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________