Semi-Partisan Politics

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The cynical, virtue-signalling Left think nothing of abusing the term ‘racism’, using it as a blunt cudgel to bash right wing policies when reasoned debate is too much effort. In this hysterical universe, even the Chancellor’s Budget can be deemed ‘racist’

Just so we are all on the same page, here is the dictionary definition of racism:

• the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
• prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

There’s not too much ambiguity here, it should be fairly simple to understand. But not for Varinder Singh, Left Foot Forward pundit and secretary to an unnamed Member of Parliament.

Singh is possessed of a racism detector whose needle jerks from “Just about OK” to “Ku Klux Klan” if affirmative action isn’t baked into absolutely every government policy working its way through parliament. And the latest target of his ire is George Osborne’s 2015 summer Budget, which he casually labels “racist” for failing to sufficiently patronise and condescend to Britain’s ethnic minorities.

In order to arrive at this surprising conclusion, Singh relies on a report by The Runnymede Trust, which deduced that ethnic minorities will be disproportionately worse off as a result of George Osborne’s fiscal tinkering. And then he changes the definition of the word “racism” to mean “policies that fail to actively promote my own personal agenda”.

The evidence for this sinister racism coursing through government policy? Well, the inheritance tax for a start:

With Osborne’s new budget, the inheritance tax will no longer take effect until assets reach up to £1 million. Right now, the average White British household holds around £221,000 while Black African households hold only £21,000, and Bangladeshi households hold £15,000.

Because of this already stark gap, very few BME families can hope to receive any benefit from this provision. To be fair, most White households will not benefit from this either, but it’s much, much more likely than for BME households.

Quelle horreur! So anything that benefits rich people is now racist, are we clear? Because ethnic minorities (sorry, we call ourselves BAME now, apparently) are poor. Of course, however, this makes rather a lot of other policies now Officially Racist too.

Lowering Gordon Brown’s punitive 50% rate of taxation to 45% was definitely racist. And any Russian or Middle Eastern non-doms living in London, though by definition they hail from countries other than Britain, are the most racist of the lot. Against themselves.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that George Osborne’s Child Tax Credit reforms are racist too:

Did your family decide to have more than two kids? If so, you’ve surpassed the new limit, and you can expect to see a cut to your income via an amended tax credit system. This has a hugely disproportionate impact on Black and Asian families, 24 per cent of which have more than two children, whereas only 8 per cent of White families have more than two children.

So apparently the virtuous thing to do is to continue subsidising poor people to have large families that they cannot afford to keep without taxpayer help, because to do otherwise would be a racist assault on all of the Irish Catholic families living in Britain. Or the Bangladeshis.

Varinder Singh leaves us to ponder these great injustices with this snide thought:

Was this an oversight on the part of CCHQ and senior figures in the Conservative Party who put together and approved this new budget?

It’s hard to say for sure. But a spokesperson for the Treasury claimed: “HMT has fully considered equality impacts on different protected groups”. If this is true, then Osborne needs to hire better policy researchers.

What complete and utter hogwash.

I write all this as an ethnic minority person, but one who is thoroughly sick of being used as a prop by the right-on Left Foot Forward punditry to advance their quisling political agenda. I wasn’t born into privilege, but neither do I need every single government policy passed through Parliament to be specifically calibrated to give me a leg up in this life. I’ll advance myself through my own graft and hard work, as have many thousands and millions of others before me.

The virtue-signalling Left have stolen the term ‘racism’, stripped it of its original meaning and re-purposed it as a potent force to attack conservatives and other liberty-minded people who don’t believe it is the government’s solemn duty to produce hideously convoluted pieces of legislation that take into account the varying impact on every ethnic group and subgroup resident on these islands.

One wonders precisely what reports such as this by The Runnymede Trust are meant to achieve. If every new policy had to go through multiple additional levels of scrutiny to ensure an equal impact on all races within Britain – and government departments already have to pay lip service to this nonsensical idea thanks to the 2010 Equality Act – nothing would ever get done. What would an ethnically sensitive Budget actually look like, for heaven’s sake?

So long as our society does not consist of people living in equal sized caves with equal sized sticks as their only possessions, government policy will inherently help or hinder different people in different ways. So again, why fixate on something both natural and unavoidable?

There are two reasons. Firstly, because it provides a quick and easy way for the British political Left to score quick points in the media when going line by line through the Conservative manifesto and coming up with reasoned left-wing critiques of right wing policy is just too much effort. Why go to such lengths as proposing alternative policies when you can just brandish this report and shout the word “racist” at anyone who disagrees with you?

But secondly, combing through government policy and running to the media accusing George Osborne of seeking to cast black Britons into penury achieves the multiculturalist’s chief aim – the further atomisation of our country, moving us away from being a united British people of different colours and religions toward becoming a splintered and warring coalition of competing special interest groups, each one jealously guarding its own privileges and howling in outrage whenever another group gets the upper hand.

Well, that’s not the type of society I want to live in. I want the government to ensure our national security, safeguard our personal liberty, create as level a playing field as possible and then butt out and leave the rest to ‘we the people’. It is not government’s place to right every past wrong or correct every single iniquity. And even if it were right and proper for government to do so, it is not “racist” just because a government policy fails to favour one race or ethnic group over another.

Claiming that George Osborne’s 2015 Summer Budget is “racist” is a gross and baseless slur against the Chancellor’s name. But more than this, it completely devalues the meaning of racism when the term is used in such a throwaway, cavalier fashion to attack someone simply for holding different political beliefs.

The knuckle-dragging, moronic kid who dragged me out of the queue for the school tuck shop when I was eleven and called me a “nigger” was racist. I know that he was, because I still remember that incident twenty years later, and how it made me feel.

I felt no similar attack on my person when George Osborne delivered his 2015 Budget speech, because my sense of personal self worth is not so pathetically brittle that I wilt whenever a new government policy fails to personally benefit me because of the colour of my skin.

Vaz Singh needs to go away and reflect on the real meaning of racism. And then he needs to take to the pages of Left Foot Forward and write an apology to George Osborne.

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