Miles Bassett is a former Chair of Wandsworth and Merton Young Conservatives.
“Why are you a Tory?” Asked a friend whilst at University, “They’re not for black people.” Black, Londoner, and solidly Labour. I’ll never forget those words, nor how they made me wince that night in the university library.
I’ll also never forget being called “anti-black” in my postgraduate Afro-Caribbean Society WhatsApp group chat, on the eve of the 2019 general election, when I had shown the temerity to disagree with the admin’s message of encouragement to the other members to lend their vote to Labour that evening.
I could never have voted for Jeremy Corbyn; with his desire for two more divisive referendums on Brexit and Scottish independence, I felt he would have been devastating for the country.
But despite those two experiences, I stuck with the Conservative Party, because I felt what I was doing was right. I have a strong sense of identity with my country, and a desire to make it a better place. These are values more proudly expressed by the Conservative Party, not Labour.
I could have sacrificed these values and joined Labour out of a sense of “safety”, but there is nothing democratic with a political system where black people are effectively locked into joining and voting for one party forever.
I know many Black Britons, deep down, share my sentiments. In fact, although many feel a sense of displacement in the UK, once they return to their parents’ or grandparents’ countries on holiday, they often suddenly realise how British they really are; I remember vividly feeling this way myself whilst visiting family in the Caribbean when I was younger.
However, that doesn’t mean Black Britons will celebrate their newly discovered sense of Britishness or vote for the Conservative Party, because they nonetheless still feel ‘othered’ in Britain. The Conservatives must therefore do more to feel like they do belong. That’s the goal we need to work towards.
But as I stood in my parents’ kitchen last week, with my aghast black mother, listening to the LBC broadcast reveal Frank Hester’s words, it was clear we took a great leap in the opposite direction from that goal.
It’s hard to describe the cocktail of emotions I felt listening to that report; shock, sadness and frustration, but also genuine alarm. An existential alarm.
Did my Mum deserve to be hated, or even shot, because of one man’s disapproval of Dianne Abbott? Did my black female friends or black female MPs on both the left and the right of politics deserve to be a target? Because if one man merely hates them privately from afar, what would the other man, now more emboldened in his convictions do?
After all, we now have an unnerving precedent that extremist forces, from both neo-fascism to Islamic extremism, have in the past decade showed their hatred by murdering MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.
So where can we go from here? There is a massive lesson to be learnt: we don’t live in a post-racial society.
That fallacy is over. If we truly did, the mere image of Diane Abbott would not make an entire demographic of people worthy of hatred. We would, as those who criticise positive discrimination so often claim, focus our criticism onto the individual – Abbott’s race and gender would simply be moot.
Instead, black women bare a huge brunt of prejudices in our society, from facing greater job insecurity when wearing Afrocentric hairstyles, being more likely to die in childbirth, and being unable to advocate without being described as aggressive – an old racial trope. Patching together these individual instances of prejudices paints a picture of a systemic racial bias against black women.
Hester himself has suffered racial discrimination from being Irish. But ultimately, he’s able to cloak his Irishness when he walks into a meeting room if necessary and shield himself from discrimination. But a black woman’s blackness cannot be cloaked, it is there forever, a permanent, visual target.
But why is this so hard to accept? Being a Conservative doesn’t inherently mean we must find the issue of confronting race so cognitively unbearable. There is nothing to champion about a society where we criticize a black female MP with “visceral disgust” (according to Labour’s own Forde report) and worthy of execution and outright hatred, along with all other black women.
So whatever the party ultimately chooses to do with the money, whether it returns it or uses it to invest in programmes to help disadvantaged black communities, it won’t be enough – unless we use this incident to reflect and accept on how deep and dangerous racism still is in our society.
It is an uncomfortable truth, but through acceptance we can start the process of building a genuine post-racial society. Now is the chance for the Conservative Party to take the bold chance and acknowledge this. We must shift our focus onto what we do have in common as a people – black Welshmen, white Scotswomen or Asian Mancunians – and throw our resolve at building a Britain that works for all.
The process will be emotionally painful for us all, of course it will. But we must keep our eyes on the prize: building and enjoying a more harmonious and steadfast Britain.
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Author: Miles Bassett
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