How should the left respond to a black Tory leader?

November 5, 2024 –
From Socialist Worker (UK)

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New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch (Photo: flickr/ Conservative Party)

The election of Kemi Badenoch as Tory leader last week shows clearly the party is preparing for a lurch even further to the hard right.

This will be part of a strategy to re-unite all sections of the right. The loss of millions of right wing votes to Reform UK at July’s polls, and the election of five Reform UK MPs, cost the Tories dearly.

It’s partly why the Tories have so few MPs today that they can barely construct the usual array of shadow ministers and assistants.

The Tories think Badenoch has all the credentials needed for a reconstruction job. As an “anti-woke” warrior, she has spoken out against trans+ people, “excessive” maternity pay and autistic people apparently having “too many” rights.

And Badenoch was a minister in Liz Truss’s short-lived, hard right disaster government. Almost unbelievably, Tory members view this as a credential.

But everyone knows it’s racism that will be central to any Tory reconstruction programme.

Reform UK thrives on hatred of migrants. Its leader Nigel Farage deliberately stoked the flames of this summers’ racist riots and the arson attacks on asylum seeker hotels that accompanied them. Its leaders say publicly that Britain should let refugees crossing the Channel drown.

In a bid to win back support from such a party, Badenoch will spout similar filth. But, for the Tories, there are dangers in this strategy. Most important of these is that Britain is nowhere near as racist as they are.

The size of the anti-racist response to the summer riots, and the mainstream reaction to them, are signs of this. Here the Tory machine hopes to use the very “identity politics” that it says it despises.

Badenoch, as a black woman of Nigerian heritage, cannot be accused of racism, it will cry. And any criticism of her party’s policies as racist will also be met with a similar response.

The Tories will use Badenoch’s ethnicity as a shield for some of their most backward and prejudiced outbursts.

The question of how the left responds to this is important. Some will argue that by spouting racism, Badenoch has “betrayed” her blackness or that she is in some way black in outward appearance only.

But this is a reactionary argument that assumes there is some politics inherent to being black.

Others, including Labour MPs, will shy away from attacking Badenoch’s policies as racist, fearing that this will alienate racist Labour voters. Neither of these approaches will do.

Instead, socialists must understand that Badenoch is first and foremost a warrior for her class—the ruling class. She is a representative of a narrow layer of wealthy black and brown people who see their interests best

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