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The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:34 pm Do you know what Malcolm you just cannot see what Rupa Huq said was wrong you see it as wrong because of the timing I see it as wrong becasue it was racist. That Peep Show clip I posted whilst a parody is very revealing of your attitude.You are so very, very off-base with this. I was the one doing the mentoring and the community work...
Keir Starmer wants to show that Labour is ready for power. The days of irresponsible policies and crank MPs are over. They are the adults in the room after successive waves of Tory crises. Only a few hours before his speech at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday this pristine image was dented.
At a conference fringe event Rupa Huq, the MP for Ealing Central and Acton, said of the Chancellor of Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, that “he superficially is a black man”. She added, by way of absurd evidence: “He went to Eton, he went to a very expensive prep school… if you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn’t know he’s black.” Huq had the whip suspended for these comments.
Huq’s viewpoint is offensive, but what is immediately striking is just how bizarre it is. Why should being privately educated and well spoken disqualify someone from being black? Are the only authentically black people the ones who grew up in council estates and sound like rappers? Huq is hostile to Kwarteng’s politics. This is fair enough; disputation is fundamental to politics. But embedded in her mind, apparently, is a view of black people that ought to be unthinkable for someone who represents a party that prides itself on progressive values on race.
More than a decade ago, in a Newsnight debate on the 2011 London riots, the Tudor historian David Starkey made this comment about the Tottenham MP David Lammy: “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.” This was part of a wider tirade about the influence of black culture on British society: white people in cities up and down the country now sound black. But thankfully, you’ve got people like Lammy on the other side of this, showing that black people can escape their blackness.
Huq seems to think the same. Her comments suggest that to be black is to occupy the lowest rungs of society, and only the Labour Party can save black people. Rich black Tories like Kwarteng betray their identity. They lose their black card because they undermine Huq’s picture of race. Black people can be rich or poor, left-wing or right-wing. They can sound like Kwasi Kwarteng or Dizzee Rascal.
I find it astonishing I even have to write that there is more than one way to be a black person. But the Labour Party is full of surprises. In his speech Starmer, echoing Tony Blair, described Labour as “the party of the centre ground”. “Once again,” he said, “we are the political wing of the British people.” Against the current Tory government, and according to the recent polls, this may be so. But there are still, as the Huq example demonstrates, attitudes about race within the party that run contrary to the centre ground. Starmer still has a lot of work to do.
Youngian wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:37 pm Either way it, the party doesn’t have time to explain distractions so its naughty step for Ms Huq.I think it'll amount to a lot more than merely time sat on the naughty step for Ms Huq. By the sounds of it, there seems a very real chance that she will step down as an MP imminently, or at the very least be required not to stand again at the next GE.
Arrowhead wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 3:23 pmLabour will be open to charges of hypocrisy if her case is treated any less seriously than the anti-Semites, it will do enormous damage if she's let off.Youngian wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:37 pm Either way it, the party doesn’t have time to explain distractions so its naughty step for Ms Huq.I think it'll amount to a lot more than merely time sat on the naughty step for Ms Huq. By the sounds of it, there seems a very real chance that she will step down as an MP imminently, or at the very least be required not to stand again at the next GE.
Crabcakes wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:16 am Thing is, the people Malc has worked with are entirely entitled to their opinion from their life experience, and he can share that opinion based on his life experience in working with them, AND it can still be true other people of colour (in fact, even the same people) think it was racist. It is not an either/or scenario.What best sums up my view is from the New Statesman article I linked to
What we can all agree on, and I expect (giving the benefit of the doubt) what Huq was trying to say is that minority representation is a wasted opportunity if that person seemingly brings nothing of themselves and *their* life experience to the table. And I would be amazed to find that a black man who went to Eton whose parents had emigrated from Ghana had the same experience as, say, Boris Johnson. Simply because there were and are people at that school like Boris Johnson. It’s not about him ‘escaping his blackness’, it’s about him seemingly being unable to relate to others whose blackness most certainly has been used to hold them back.
Huq seems to think the same. Her comments suggest that to be black is to occupy the lowest rungs of society, and only the Labour Party can save black people. Rich black Tories like Kwarteng betray their identity. They lose their black card because they undermine Huq’s picture of race. Black people can be rich or poor, left-wing or right-wing. They can sound like Kwasi Kwarteng or Dizzee Rascal.
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