There were some pretty distasteful comments about me on Facebook earlier this year.
I found myself described as a ‘black boy’ who, because I went to Oxford (a ‘posh uni’), and ‘live in an expensive village’, was somebody whose ‘life bears no bloody resemblance to black kids growing up in the inner city’.
My comments on racial issues were dismissed because I lack the ‘self-awareness to see he is being used’. I am described as ‘a traitor to his race and to his colour’ because I am a Conservative MP.
You might think that this patronising and racist nonsense might had been written by the English Defence League, or perhaps by fragments of the hard Left. Yet these comments came from a local Liberal Democrat activist in my constituency.
According to Facebook, her post was seen by at least half a dozen current or former Lib Dem councillors and candidates in the area, including their Hitchin and Harpenden parliamentary spokesman. None of them objected or criticised what she had to say.
And since then, she has been described by the Lib Dem party’s parliamentary spokesman as someone who finds ‘racism utterly abhorrent in all its forms’. Hmmm.
Politicians such as myself have thick skins and we take the rough with the smooth. However, others not in the public eye must also deal with this patronising nonsense disguised as liberalism.
Are black men not supposed to be allowed to attend top schools, live in nice villages, or support whatever political party they wish? Or is the only way of being authentically black to live in the ‘inner city’?
It is such regressive attitudes, notably prevalent among sections of the ‘progressive’ Left, which is one of the principal racist barriers holding back so many black people in this country.
The sad truth is that black people will not be able to fully thrive until conceited liberals of this sort stop trying to keep us in ‘our place’.
People of any background or colour should aspire to achieve whatever they set their minds to. When I see my black Conservative colleagues like James Cleverly, Kwasi Kwarteng, Kemi Badenoch, Darren Henry, Helen Grant and others, I see people who are not just politicians of great ability but people who were all very successful in their careers before politics.
We are Conservatives because we believe in opportunity for everybody. We do not believe that you should be kept in your place because you are black, Asian or, indeed, white from a working-class background.
The bigotry of many in the Left is insidious and hidden.
Black people and other minorities are too often seen as people to be looked after, or controlled, or patronised. Many on the Left proclaim racial equality in public and virtue-signal for Black Lives Matter, yet actually do not seem to want individual black people to have the right to choose their own destiny.
And, of course, when minorities do talk about their experience of racism, they must ensure it fits the agenda of this band of anti-racists.
During the summer, we had the shameless spectacle of 32 Labour MPs dismissing Home Secretary Priti Patel’s experience of racism as ‘gaslighting’ – discounting her evidence as manipulative and dishonest. When people of colour do not toe the line the Left wants them to take, they face racist condemnation.
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Source: Daily Mail
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