Moral Immunity

In an episode of the Simpsons from 1995, the evil tycoon Montgomery Burns bribes Krusty the Clown into supporting his entry in a local film competition. When Krusty is asked why he backed Burns’s movie, he responds: ‘Let’s just say it moved me … TO A BIGGER HOUSE. Oops, I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.’ Now a classic meme, the scene is also a way in to understanding the work of the philosopher Jennifer Mather Saul, whose recent book, Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, analyses the tools used to disguise racist utterances in public discourse.

There are two ways racists avoid saying the quiet part loud. Saul defines a ‘dogwhistle’ as a ‘coded utterance which transmits a message to a select group that would be unacceptable to the broader audience’. Writing in the Telegraph in September, ahead of winning the Conservative leadership contest, Kemi Badenoch said that she expects immigrants to ‘share our values’, and that we should reject the idea that ‘all cultures are valid’. Referring to people with incompatible or intolerant ‘values’ or ‘cultures’ is code for ‘Muslims’. Those whose minds are steeped in Islamophobia will catch the meaning; others might take the point more innocuously.

‘Figleaves’ are rhetorical shields placed alongside racist utterances to protect against or cast doubt on accusations of wrongdoing. The most well-worn is the addendum that ‘some of my friends are Black’. This kind of innocence by association can be powerfully invoked by cutting out the middleman and having a person of colour give voice to widely held racist sentiments and policies. The position of Conservative home secretary – racist commander-in-chief – is a prime example: four of the last five architects of the Tories’ hostile environment were people of colour (Suella Braverman, whose ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’ was to see asylum seekers flown to Rwanda, got the job twice).

Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative party’s ultimate figleaf, as she is happy to admit. During her leadership campaign, she wrote: ‘I am Labour’s worst nightmare, they can’t paint me as prejudiced.’ Her public record reflects this sense of moral immunity. Badenoch has said that maternity pay is ‘excessive’ and that she doesn’t ‘care about colonialism’ because ‘[I] know what we were doing before colonialism got there’. She claimed that Jeremy Corbyn and the four independent Muslim MPs whose election campaigns opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza were ‘elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics’. She has criticised businesses whose ‘main priority is social justice, not productivity and profits’, and lambasted the net zero climate target, which she refers to as ‘unilateral economic disarmament’.

One question that will come up repeatedly in the months or years ahead is whether it is fair to hold a leader of colour to a higher moral standard than their white predecessors. (This is a problem Sunak did not face because he was no more racist than the average Tory.) It seems instinctively wrong to be harder on Badenoch than, say, Boris Johnson. We shouldn’t expect more (or less, or different) from a person based only on their race, and it is dehumanising to expect conformity – ideological or otherwise – from a racial group, as though members of that group are fungible.

While these precepts hold in the general case, there are important complexities when the topic of these expectations is race and the person in question is an elected leader. What will bother many people of colour is the fact that Badenoch has witnessed and experienced racism (to take one example, she was once told, when seeking selection in a rural seat, that she was too ‘urban’, a well-established dogwhistle for ‘too Black’) and apparently learned nothing from it. We should be cautious when taking this line, since, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes, ‘suffering is partial, short-sighted and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school.’ Racism is as likely to produce bewilderment as perspicuity, and sifting one’s pain for its lessons is no joke.

Still, people of colour have opportunities to understand racism that are not easily available to white people, who are hindered in their comprehension by the seductive propaganda of whiteness. Badenoch is well positioned, as a Black woman, to grasp something vital about the way society works. That is not an ideological demand, but an empirical one. Perhaps the lesson keeps going over her head; more likely she gets it and does not want it. Either way, she deserves a special kind of condemnation.

Keir Starmer described Badenoch’s election as a ‘proud moment for our country’. He presumably meant that Black British children will see a person like them at the helm of a major political party and believe that they can do it too. Does a poor Black immigrant child look at a wealthy Black person who hates immigrants and feel a dream take shape? A recent report by the Health Foundation showed that the rate of poverty among Black families is 40 per cent – more than twice that of white families. (The figures for Pakistani and Bangladeshi families are higher still, at 48 per cent and 56 per cent respectively.) Wouldn’t it be a prouder moment for our country if a white man were to lift the two-child benefit cap, which disproportionately impoverishes families of colour?

Snarking as she means to go on, Badenoch began her first Prime Minister’s Questions as opposition leader by asking whether the foreign secretary, David Lammy, had apologised for calling Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’ in 2018 (he also said Trump was ‘no friend of Britain’). I was wondering just the same thing, having been revolted by Lammy’s unctuous tweet first thing that morning: ‘The UK has no greater friend than the US … We look forward to working with you and @JDVance in the years ahead.’ One wonders why such hypocrisy isn’t being called out from the left. One also wonders what would happen if these gestures of chivalrous political congratulation were instead seized as moments for the articulation of political critique, or else panic.

Saul’s book, published earlier this year, already feels quaint: a study of a politics of the past, when bigotry had to come with plausible deniability to be palatable to those who see themselves as liberals. Badenoch, like Trump, still makes use of these devices, but raw racism is increasingly permissible and even necessary for those who trade on their plain speaking. When quizzed by Trevor Philips about her comments on some cultures not being ‘valid’, Badenoch nonchalantly clarified that she meant Muslims who don’t like Israel.

You’re not supposed to say that out loud. Such frankness can cut both ways: it broadens the acceptable discourse in ways that embolden more overt and dangerous forms of racism but also provides glaring opportunities for indignation and protest. On what grounds, though, can Starmer’s Labour pose the challenge? If Trump and Vance are to be their friends, what does that make the slightly milder Tory leader?

The Tories are now lurching right – treading a course set for them between Starmer’s centre-right pedestrianism and Farage’s unbridled racism – under a Black leader whose moral cover will allow them to unlock new levels of hostility. She’ll be a breath of fresh air, but just the sort we always get: a cruel, icy gale from the right while all remains placid on the left of the house, as though order alone could be enough.