THERE are ways in which Kemi Badenoch’s advent as Britain’s opposition leader, at the helm of the Conservative Party, can be seen as a remarkable progression. A black Tory leader is decidedly an advance for a party that has long relied on anti-immigrant sentiment as a core value for its electoral support.

The Labour Party has consistently boasted more ethnically diverse MPs since 1987, and by 2019 more than half of its parliamentary representation consisted of women. But it has never had a female leader, and its front bench has been dominated by white men in both government and opposition. The Conservatives, by contrast, can lay claim to three female prime ministers, an Asian PM (via Kenya and Tanzania), and currently an opposition leader who was born in Wimbledon but grew up in Nigeria, and considers herself a first-generation immigrant.

As a student in England more than 40 years ago, I struggled to understand why any Briton from an ethnic background would be attracted to the Tories. The Labour alternative was problematic in many ways, but did it not point to a relatively brighter future for ethnic minorities and the working class?

I was gobsmacked in the early 1980s when a purported Pakistani community leader in Oxford — a charming host, working class by profession — turned out to be a Tory by nature. I cannot certify whether the cause lay in his political ignorance or his illiteracy. After all, certain conservative social values were endemic among early immigrants from South Asia. But, after arriving in the promised land, how could they possibly be oblivious to the race and class divide of the society in which they found themselves?

UK’s PM and his new adversary share a similar ideology.

Many of the early Caribbean immigrants recognised soon that the imagined yellow brick road was just a dirt track. It took longer for the South Asians. Some of them were radicalised by the racist experience, while others fell in line with the established order of their former colonial masters. The latter tendency has been reflected among most of those who typified both the ethnic diversity and ideological perversity of recent Tory front benchers.

That’s no excuse for Labour skipping on the diversity while more or less matching the perversity of the Conservatives. This aspect has been particularly evident since Keir Starmer, under false pretences, acquired the Labour leadership and initially focused on expelling potential adversaries — mainly critics of Israel’s inevitable descent into open genocide, including his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. It’s worth noting that Labour got fewer votes this year, when it won by a landslide, than it did in 2019, when it lost by a landslide. It suggests the British electorate is more attuned to the ideological ebbs and flows than one might assume.

Under Corbyn, Labour was for a while Europe’s largest political party in terms of membership. In his leadership bid, Starmer vowed to adhere to the party’s fairly popular manifesto, but steadily stepped away from potentially progressive leanings as opposition leader and PM, losing little time in expelling Corbyn and several of his anti-Zionist supporters from the party. Starmer’s attachment to the Zionist Netanyahu regime and its genocidal inclinations is reflected in the doubling of US special forces flights to Israel from a British base in Cyprus. What are the chances that any of the culprits on either side of the Atlantic will ever be prosecuted for war crimes? After it emerged that 100 or so Labour activists had volunteered in their spare time to door-knock for Kamala Harris and that Donald Trump was upset, Starmer was desperate to claim that it wouldn’t affect his subservience to a future Trump ad­­­-ministration.

Badenoch, for all her ‘anti-woke’ posturing and selective opposition to fellow immigrants who don’t measure up to the atrocious ‘values’ she holds dear, is unlikely to ever replace Starmer, unpopular as he may be after a budget that sufficiently assuages the IMF’s concerns with its trickle-down tendencies while pumping more resources into defence than healthcare, education or broader welfare. The tax raises won’t trouble the very rich, including his hitherto ATM Lord Waleed Alli, but nor will they benefit the working-class victims of his neoliberal predilections.

Badenoch has revived Priti Patel’s political prospects — and the likes of the even more vicious Suella Braverman, Sajid Javid and James Cleverly (who lost the leadership contest by relying too hard on the fellow idiots that populate his party) are waiting in the wings. It’s unlikely, though, that anyone is betting much on her prospects of replacing Starmer as PM at the next election. As the sixth Tory leader in eight years, she might not last long enough. On the other hand, who knows what will ensue if Starmer proceeds with his self-immolation more rapidly than one expects.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2024