Who should decide what counts as ‘extremism’?
Is it the Party that was until recently deputy-chaired by a man who believes Sadiq Khan is an Islamist? Or the Party whose biggest ever donor says that seeing Diane Abbott on the television makes him ‘want to hate all black women’? Is that the party that should decide what is extreme?
All political parties have cranks and weirdos amongst them. Some people might say that you have to be a little bit weird to join a political party in the first place – let alone to give that party £15 million of your actual money. How a party deals with its cranks and weirdos is what matters, not whether they crop up every now and then. Arguably the Conservative Party has shown – on multiple occasions – that it has a blind spot when it comes to racism.
It is not racist to dislike Sadiq Khan and to disapprove of his mayoralty. It is racist to claim that he has a hidden Islamist agenda – he is, after all, a Mayor who marches for gay pride and erects Chanukah lights in Trafalgar Square, neither an event much celebrated in Gaza.
It is not racist to dislike Diane Abbott and to disapprove of her political views. It is racist to infer from your dislike of Diane Abbott some broader contempt for everyone who shares her ethnicity. And it is disgusting and deplorable to say that she ‘should be shot’. This is a woman who has withstood decades of abuse and harassment and who blazed a trail for black and ethnic minority people in our politics. She’s earned some respect, she should not be dehumanised in this way.
But the Conservative Party didn’t want to lose ‘30p Lee’ and it doesn’t want to lose fifteen million pounds – is that why some in the Conservative Party are, in many people’s views, minimising and excusing this behaviour?
Until his defection to Reform, the narrative around Lee Anderson was that he had a way back into the Tory fold. For days, ministers on the media round performed excruciating linguistic limbos to avoid calling Anderson’s words what they were.