LABOUR is accusing the Tory government of trying to start a culture war because they “want to distract from the real issues”.
That’s perhaps the most hypocritical statement since Jeremy Corbyn said he was against anti-Semitism in the party.
After all, this is the party that last week saw its BAME MPs send a letter to our BAME home secretary Priti Patel belittling her shocking personal experiences with racism that she had bravely shared in the House of Commons.
This is the party that this week allowed their front bencher David Lammy to pour scorn on the PM’s bold new Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities set up to directly address many of the issues raised by the Blacks Lives Matter movement.
Rather than welcoming the government making an important bid to level up our society, he said the announcement was “written on the back of a fag packet”, making it clear Labour will oppose this work for petty political reasons even though it could result in important and positive changes.
And it’s the same party that last night condemned the whole project because it’s being led by Munira Mirza – the very talented head of the No10 policy unit whose family have Pakistani origins. Diane Abbot branded the entire commission “dead on arrival” because Ms Mirza “has never believed in institutional racism”.
That’s two talented BAME women whose experiences Labour has belittled, simply because they happen to have a different political ideology.
No party wants a divisive culture war more than Labour.
Why else did they spend months telling the UK public they would honour the results of the EU referendum only to cause three years of angry division after Brexit won? That particular mission was led, of course, by Mr Quiff himself Keir Starmer, now leader of the party.
Why else have Labour activists supported the desecration of Churchill’s statue and laughed at a female police officer being badly injured after falling off her horse?
By contrast, at every step of the way the Prime Minister has resolutely attempted to avoid a culture war.
Boris Johnson did not condemn the Black Lives Matter protests, despite the fact it resulted in a mass gathering of tens of thousands in the middle of a pandemic.
He has suggested that instead of pulling down statues of historic figures, we put up new ones of BAME heroes.
The government has put discovering why BAME folk are disproportionately killed by Covid-19 at the top of its health agenda.
This won’t surprise any fair minded person, given Boris picked the most ethnically diverse Cabinet of all time last year.
So I refute David Lammy’s claim that it’s the Tories who want a culture war. If there’s one party trying to stoke divisions at this highly sensitive moment in our history, it’s Labour.
