The outpourings of grief and rage that have dominated our television screens over the past fortnight have prompted great soul-searching about the state of modern Britain.
But it is important to remember a salient fact: the animating cause was an event that happened in another country – a country with a very different past and present when it comes to race relations and policing.
All our main television news networks have hammered out a relentless drumbeat of doom about racism in our country, but the worst incident they have been able to uncover in terms of the police dealing with black people since this moral panic began concerned a middle-aged couple in a suburb of Ipswich who were told to produce their driving documents for no apparent reason. An apology from Suffolk police swiftly followed. It’s hardly Mississippi Burning, is it?
In fact there is no denying that the police have adopted a far more softly-softly approach towards Black Lives Matter demonstrators – often at a cost to their own safety and the integrity of public monuments – than they did in the face of a counter-demonstration on Saturday.
In this maelstrom of media-driven national self-abasement, it almost passed unnoticed that one Conservative politician had a big idea that can identify a more optimistic way forward.
It is a path that could allow the Government to stand against the ever more shrill depictions of Britain by left-wing culture war extremists and their ever more absurd demands for removing statues, paying reparations or conceding that any and all disparities in attainment by different ethnic groups are a product of unchallenged white racism.
Kemi Badenoch, the Treasury minister who also speaks for the Government on equalities matters, may have thought she was just stating the obvious when she told a series of opposition MPs who were trying to whip up public anger that “actually, this is one of the best countries in the world to be a black person”.
But in fact the most powerful ideas are nearly always capable of being simply expressed and so the Badenoch Doctrine was born. And despite the rage of the Left that it should be enunciated at all, it is true and should become the optimistic touchstone of the Tories.
Recent decades have seen huge strides in tackling racial discrimination and inequality in Britain. A new survey from MORI shows anti-racism has become a near-universal British value. There is almost nothing left of any glass ceiling preventing black people from reaching the most senior positions in society.
The number of MPs from BAME backgrounds has increased at every general election for more than 30 years, with more than 60 now in the Commons, meaning black and Asian representation is almost in line with their proportion of the overall population. Once the younger age profile of these populations is factored in then any sense of under-representation disappears. While Sky’s Sophy Ridge may be aggrieved by the lack of black, as opposed to Asian, faces around the Cabinet table, a cadre of talented black politicians, including Ms Badenoch, are making their way into and up the ministerial ranks.
This article was published originally in the Daily Telegraph on15 June 2020. See: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/15/despite-lefts-rage-have-positive-story-tell-race/